Introduction: Writing African Elections

Summary

Introducing the idea that elections can be understood as extended moments in which multiple actors make competing claims to virtue, this chapter sets that argument in the context of an existing literature on voting and democracy in Africa. These competing claims may usefully be understood in terms of two contrasting moral registers, the civic and the patrimonial: the productive tension between these is the basis of the moral economy of elections. The making and remaking of this moral economy is shaped by four key factors: socio-economic context; the structure of political institutions; historical experience; and, the agency of actors. In the three countries studied here the moral economy constrains and enables political action in different ways. Yet in each, the moral economy shows how elections continue to attract such vigorous engagement (even where the outcome in terms of presidential power seems entirely predictable). It further explains why popular participation is not necessarily discouraged by the breaking of electoral rules; why all politicians must speak to both these moral registers; why sub-national electoral contests are often unpredictable. The moral economy approach shows why the secret ballot and adult suffrage do not always simply make national citizens, as some would hope.