Post-Election Violence in Africa

The Impact of Judicial Independence

Meshack Simati

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367271633
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000035858
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the effect of the judiciary on the incidence of post-election violence by political actors across Africa and within African countries. It examines how variation in judicial independence can constrain or incentivize election violence among democratizing states.

Using case studies and cross-national analysis, the book shows that variation in levels of judicial independence from a non-independent judiciary to a quasi-independent judiciary or from a fully independent judiciary to quasi-independent judiciary increases the likelihood of strategic use of post-election violence by non-state actors. However, the likelihood of post-election violence is significantly reduced in non-independent judiciaries or once countries' judiciaries become fully independent. The author makes the theoretical argument that, within unconsolidated states, non-state actors that view the judiciary as semi-independent are more likely to engage in post-election violence with the purpose of creating political and professional uncertainty in order to influence assertive behaviour from judges in disputed elections. Consequently, the book argues that semi-independent judiciaries or judiciaries that are neither fully controlled by the incumbent nor fully independent from the incumbent can help explain post-election violence among unconsolidated states, all else being equal.

This book will be of interest to scholars of election violence, democratic politics, law and politics and African politics.

Part I
The danger of election violence

Theory

1
Election violence and judicial independence

The emergence of multiparty politics in Africa in the early 1990s ushered in several challenges. One of these challenges was expanding political space for competing political interests while at the same time building institutions that would midwife the differences resulting from different social groups within the state vying for political office to advance their policy preferences. Essentially, experimenting with democracy laid bare the oxymoron of opening up political participation to citizens within the context of weak political institutions, ill-equipped to mitigate differences emerging from different political parties competing for political power.

Among several African countries, subsequent elections revealed that once a party won elections, whether credibly or not, those in power embarked on manipulating and weakening institutions or engaging in electoral manipulation or using Parliament majorities to amend the constitution to stay in power. For instance, Denis Sassou Nguesso, president of Congo Brazzaville from 1979, lost in the first-ever multiparty elections in 1992. After staying out of government for five years as the leader of an opposition party, he cobbled together a rebel outfit and marched into Brazzaville in 1997 with his rebel forces to oust the sitting president, Pascal Lissouba. His government presided over a constitutional referendum that introduced term and age limits, barring his two closest competitors from participating. He would again preside over another constitutional¹ referendum in 2015, amending the law to allow him to run for a third term as the de facto leader for Congo Brazzaville for the next 20 years.

Congo’s next-door neighbor in the north, the Central African Republic, also held its first multiparty elections in 1992. In 2003, Francois Bozize, a military officer, staged a coup² and overthrew the sitting president, Felix Patasse, while he was out of the country. Bozize called for elections in 2005 but prior to elections, he amended the constitution to bar his fiercest competitors, including his predecessor, Patasse, from vying. He easily won the elections. Bozize himself would later become a victim of a forced regime change in 2013 when the majority Muslim seleka rebel group marched into Bangui to relieve him of his presidential duties and effectively force him into exile in Cameroon.³

Similarly, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Idriss Deby in Chad came to power as rebel leaders in 1986 and 1990 respectively. After adopting multiparty systems, they won their first two terms and proceeded to use their parties’ numerical strength in Parliament to amend the constitution to abolish term limits, allowing them to run for office indefinitely.⁴ Borrowing a leaf from his contemporary in Uganda, Kagame also used Parliament and a referendum to eliminate term limits early 2017.⁵ Recently, Yoweri Museveni has again used his political party’s numerical strength in Parliament⁶ to eliminate the age limit for presidential candidates (currently capped at 74) as enshrined in the Ugandan constitution. Eliminating the age limit has effectively enabled Museveni to vie again in 2021 when he is 76 years old, joining the ranks of presidents Paul Biya and Kagame as African presidents without age and term limits.

Consequently, opposition parties in sub-Saharan Africa have increasingly found it difficult to dislodge the incumbent at the ballot box. In fact, Cheeseman (2015) finds that during elections, the incumbent and the ruling party have an 80 percent chance of retaining their seat, but this likelihood drops to 50 percent for an open seat without an incumbent. Both the ruling party and the opposition have therefore resorted to employing what Schedler (2002, 2006, 2009) refers to as the menu of manipulation tactics to fraudulently win or retain power and entrench themselves, effectively locking out the opposition from having a fair shot at winning executive power. Although both the ruling party and the incumbent engage in electoral manipulation, recent research by Taylor, Pevehouse, and Straus (2017) finds that elections in which an incumbent president is defending their seat have a higher likelihood of pre-election and post-election violence. As opposition parties find it extremely tenuous to unseat the incumbent, they are increasingly resorting to using both constitutional and extraconstitutional means, such as strategic use of violence, to increase their chances for winning the executive office, especially during elections, periods that provide possible alternation of power.

Election violence

Elections have become increasingly integral to democracies as a cornerstone not only in determining who gets to govern and enjoy the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence but also as a sign of deepening and consolidating democracy (Lindberg, 2006; Diamond, 1997). But yet, among developing countries elections are not the only game in town (Linz & Stepan, 1996:5–6) that determines who gets to govern. As (Schedler, 2002, 2006, 2009) points out, incumbents and the opposition parties among young democracies have a variety of ways that they use to get to power or stay in power, including election violence.

Over time, election violence – particularly in democratizing countries – has become ubiquitous and subsequently stimulated research on its effects. Various scholars have found that election violence can prolong conflicts (Bekoe, 2012), stagnate democracy (Bogaards, 2013) and lessen satisfaction and support for democracy (Burchard, 2015). Following these findings, there has been a concerted effort with recent research focused on election violence prevention, particularly with interventions around attitude transformation (Finkel, 2014; Fischer, 2017; Höglund, Jarstad, & Kovacs, 2009; Birch & Muchlinski, 2018), capacity building (Birch & Muchlinski, 2018; Darnolf & Cyllah, 2014; Claes & Von Borzyskowski, 2018), election monitoring (Asunka et al., 2019; Claes, 2016; Claes & Von Borzyskowski, 2018) and security planning (Claes, 2016; Claes & Von Borzyskowski, 2018).

Manipulation of elections to favor one party is not a new phenomenon. What has changed are the techniques used even in the presence of institutions that safeguard against such practices. For instance, Seymour and Frary (1918) write that in the 20th century in Hungary, the Magyars would engage in suppressing the non-Magyar vote in close elections by either breaking down bridges or declaring the bridges unsafe. Similarly, to stop non-Magyars from turning out the vote, veterinarians would sabotage non-Magyars’ mode of transportation by feigning a disease for horses in outlying villages to keep them under quarantine until the day after elections.

Although the practice of strategic manipulation of elections by using election violence is not a new phenomenon, earlier research on election violence had two major problems. These works either failed to correctly measure election violence or relied on country year data which failed to account for the timing and motivation of the violence. The earliest empirical research on this topic was by Powell (1982), ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I The danger of election violence: theory
• PART II Evidence
• PART III Policy implications
• Index