Journal Articles

When Do Votes Count?: Regime Type, Electoral Conduct, and Political Competition in Africa

---

The effects of electoral systems have been tested recently in Africa, raising several questions: Are the systematic effects of electoral rules the same across regime types? Does the conduct of elections affect the process of strategic coordination between voters and parties? The literature to date has not considered these issues and also analyzes elections in settings where a crucial set of its assumptions are clearly violated. The authors argue that the mechanism of strategic coordination only operates in democracies that hold free and fair elections, and they exhibit the ways it is violated outside of this domain. They compile a new data set on sub-Saharan African elections and show that the interaction of electoral rules and ethnopolitical cleavages predicts the number of parties only in democratic settings, failing to produce substantive effects in nondemocratic ones

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Comparative Political Studies

Call Number

-

Publisher

California : Sage Publications., 2008

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0010-4140

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Vol. 41, No. 11, November 2008. Page 1466-1491

Subject(s)

Elections
Party Systems
Africa
Ethnic Heterogeneity
Regime Type
Electoral Conduct
When Do Votes Count

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment