Re-Examining Elections after African Experiences

Project Abstract

After the end of many one-party political systems in the 1990s, the number and frequency of elections worldwide has steadily increased. Nevertheless, research about elections in Sub-Saharan Africa has shown that this increase has rarely been accompanied by improvements in the impartiality and transparency of the political processes. On the contrary, the absence of these conditions is undermining voting procedures and depriving them of their essential function: guaranteeing the accountability and the periodic renewal of the political elites. Furthermore, elections in most Sub-Saharan African countries are becoming imperfect imitations of Western democratic rituals.

In order to efficiently address these problems, the notion of « election » must be extended to include the entire procedure of selection and entitlement of the political elites: the way in which an election produces - or re-produces - a political hierarchy is the result of the perceptions and actions of a vast number of actors, not all of which are necessarily involved in the vote. The vote is a procedure intended to produce a numeric result, which in turn will legitimate a political hierarchy; the ballot cannot be assimilated to the entire election nor be the sole object of an analysis aiming to explain the attribution of political mandates.

The project Re-examining Elections after African Experiences adopts a comparative socio-anthropological approach. It intends to associate quantitative and qualitative analysis of the voting processes with qualitative inquiries about how the actors involved experience the entire electoral process, from the designation of the candidates to the reactions following the results. Its objective is to reveal the representation rule and their attribution of the right to govern to the elites.

The project entails the creation of Eleqta, an IT tool ensuring the safe and rapid upload of quantitative and qualitative data through smartphones by the inquiry teams in the field; data entered will range from purely quantitative elements to text, images, videos and sound. Eleqta will also ensure the standardization of the data collected according to an established methodological framework, as well as its coherence that will be guaranteed through a series of cross-validation processes. The scope of Eleqta is to make this data available to and exploitable by researchers, by allowing them to conduct comparative research while filtering the data through a number of geographical, temporal and thematic criteria.

Research teams composed by researchers who are based in the targeted countries collect the data and conduct the field inquiries. These teams are directed by locally based scholars and will be instructed as concerns the methodological framework and the use of Eleqta to upload the data; team members will be remunerated and provided with the necessary devices for data collection and upload.

Representatives from all the teams will participate once a year to a series of working sessions or seminars aiming to perfect the methodological framework and review the interview questionnaires and the observations checklists used during the inquiries.