The Trouble With Elections
By Paul Collier
In African countries where leaders have unrestricted power, it takes more than voting to bring about change.
In Africa, presidential elections have become the fashionable norm, like state airlines used to be. This year there will be 15 of them. But like those airlines, in the absence of supporting institutions elections have proved to be more decorative than functional, a veneer beneath which the autocratic rule of the pre-1991 era continues little abated. Autocracy in Africa was ruinous: Narrow ethnically based elites plundered the country for their own short-term benefit. America and the other Western countries that encouraged democracies were right to think that what Africa needed was accountability of government to citizen, but wrong to think that this could be achieved simply by elections.
Africa needs democracy and a few countries have it. The African National Congress has just won the South African elections. No surprise there. Other elections in southern Africa will shortly follow. In October, Mozambique will go to the polls. The election should be peaceful and clean, a testimony to the country’s progress. Angola will hold presidential elections sometime later this year and unfortunately, this is likely to be a different story. Don’t expect a cliff-hanger: Already 30 years in office, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos is heading for his fourth decade. Angola totally lacks the institutions necessary, such as a free press and an independent judiciary, for an election to give an opposition party any chance of gaining power.
The era of naive faith in elections began following the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leaders had been utterly allergic to contested elections. We assumed they were right to be allergic: Elections would topple dictators. And so, in Eastern Europe and then around the developing world, we pretty well defined the switch to freedom in terms of contested elections. We now know that Soviet leaders were dumb: They had such unrestricted power that they would have been able to win contested elections easily. As long as an incumbent leader has enough options, facing an election need not be too daunting.
One potential weakness of elections in developing countries is that electorates may be so ill-informed about economic issues that they support populist politicians. This has been the recent experience in parts of Latin America such as Venezuela and Bolivia.
It may become a problem in Jacob Zuma’s South Africa, but it will probably not amount to much. After Mr. Zuma won a power struggle within the African National Congress, last month’s national election was merely a formality given the dominance of the party. Mr. Zuma flirted with populism to gain the leadership, but now he is secure barring a political earthquake. He is a shrewd politician and knows that the real check on his power now is the currency markets: South Africa needs to finance a substantial payments deficit.
It will be many years before a South African election results in a change of government, but Ghana reached that milestone last December. The ruling party lost the election by a whisker, which is the most convincing demonstration that it was clean. This was all the more impressive following the disastrous elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya earlier in the year. Admittedly in Ghana the president of the incumbent party was not standing, and a ruling party minus its incumbent leader may have much less advantage. Crucially, the members of the Electoral Commission were genuinely independent of government.
Annual elections, of course, would be a distraction. But within the normal range of three to seven years, my colleague Lisa Chauvet of the research center DIAL in Paris and I find that an increase in the frequency of elections tends significantly to improve economic policy. When faced with the need to win regular elections, governments systematically improved policies as measured by the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment, an annual measure of the economies of developing countries. For example, if elections are every three years instead of every seven, the chances of policy improvement go up by around a half.
For anyone who has heard the critiques of the World Bank coming from many of the international development non-governmental organizations, this result is amazing. The NGOs claimed to be campaigning “on behalf of the voiceless” against policies that were inimical to local interests. The World Bank agenda, which included anathemas like fiscal caution, liberalized markets and privatization, was externally imposed to serve the interests of global capitalism. Surprising, then, that when the voiceless gain the power of the ballot, their policy preferences seem to be pretty consistent with those of the World Bank.
Here is the catch: Crooked elections have no effect. In most African countries the frequency of contested elections has increased, but this does not help if they are not properly conducted. Robert Mugabe’s stealing of the Zimbabwean election last year is an extreme instance, but not an isolated one.
Electoral misconduct has been disturbingly common in low-income countries. The key crooked tactics are voter bribery, voter intimidation and ballot fraud. In each of them the incumbent has an advantage. Bribery needs money, but as long as the national budget is leaky the president has more of it than the opponents. With sufficient money, voters can be bribed individually, or the local big man can be bribed to deliver votes wholesale; often entire villages vote for the same candidate. Voter intimidation needs forces of violence, but the president likely has the police and the army. Ballot fraud needs the subservience of election officials, who may well be presidential placemen.
Pedro Vicente of Trinity College in Dublin and I tested the effect of voter intimidation through a randomized experiment. We chose the Nigerian presidential election of 2007, which was expected to be violent, and injected a campaign to reduce intimidation, randomly assigning it among constituencies. The campaign, conducted by the local NGO ActionAid, delivered the message, “Vote against violent politicians,” using street theater and posters. It worked, significantly reducing the number of violent incidents and making voters braver.
In the constituencies where the campaign took place the vote for violent politicians was lower, and the turnout for other candidates rose by around 9%.
How much of an advantage do crooked tactics confer? Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University and I have just investigated that using data on 786 elections, some clean, others crooked, in 155 countries since 1979. The effect of crooked tactics turns out to be massive, nearly tripling the incumbent’s expected duration in office.
Crooked tactics also get incumbents off the hook of needing good economic performance. If incumbents are confined to honest electoral tactics, then raising the growth rate from zero to 5% is one of the best ways of retaining power: The time in office increases by around 60%. By using illicit methods the priority for policy can be switched from national growth to private patronage. So crooked tactics not only keep you in office, they make office more rewarding for crooks.
A few structural characteristics make some societies highly exposed to crooked tactics. Poverty is a risk factor, but it is the compound of poverty with a small population and dependence upon natural resource revenues that takes the risk level through the roof. Small is not beautiful when it comes to elections, and in small societies it is probably easier for an incumbent to keep the sinews of power personalized. Valuable natural resources should be an opportunity for prosperity, but in practice they tend to increase the incentive to hang onto power by whatever means, and to make it easier for incumbents to do so. That is why there is no chance that the Angolan elections will result in a change of power.
This cocktail of poverty, small populations and natural-resource dependence characterizes most of Africa and the other societies of the bottom billion. It stands in contrast to India which, despite its poverty, has succeeded in maintaining a functioning democracy. I think that India’s huge size and lack of natural resources has helped. It also contrasts with the new democracies of Eastern Europe such as Poland and the Czech Republic. Not only were these societies already middle-income and not resource dependent, but a degree of political discipline was imposed by the goal of membership of the European Union.
One small, resource-rich African society, Botswana, has managed to beat the odds, establishing such checks and balances as freedom of the press and veto power over presidential decisions, thanks to the good fortune of exceptional initial leadership that has been maintained by successors. Unusually for Africa, Botswanan presidents have not exceeded their sell-by date and the candidate of the ruling party has only been in office for a year. The ruling party has an outstanding economic track record and deserves to win October’s election; I expect it will do so. But in most African societies elections were introduced without adequate checks and balances. The result has usually not been the accountable and legitimate governments that had confidently been expected.
Mr. Mugabe of Zimbabwe recently provided a spectacular demonstration of how to steal an election. If at first you don’t succeed—and despite bribery and ballot fraud Mr. Mugabe lost the first round in March 2008—try, try and try again. In the second round, delayed until June to give him time to change tactics, all it took was sufficiently brutal voter intimidation. For good measure many of the party workers of the opposition were beaten up and several murdered. After that, and the pitiful connivance of regional leaders in Mr. Mugabe’s retention of power, there could be no doubt that African elections face problems.
The major political development in Africa over the past year has not been the patchy conduct of elections, but the comeback of the coup d’etat. Since independence there have been over 80 successful coups in Africa and hundreds of attempts, but their incidence had seemed to be in secular decline. Perhaps their revival is due to the French decision a decade ago to pull back from paternalism in Francophone West Africa. Coups are imitative, and once the French allowed one in Cote d’Ivoire to succeed, several others in West Africa followed.
While nobody wants a return to French paternalism, the international community could step up to the more limited role of protecting democratic governments from coups on condition that they conducted elections properly. For this to work, protection from coup risk would need to be an acceptable price to pay for facing the greater risk of loss of office implied by the honest conduct of elections.
In the past 12 months there have been four successful coups. In two of them, Madagascar and Mauritania, the coup deposed a democratically elected government: Being democratically elected provides no significant protection. Coups depose presidents but create precedents: From now on few African presidents can sleep easy.
The blatantly stolen election in Zimbabwe and the run of coups have coincided with new regional and international political developments. At the regional level the seven-year-old African Union, toothless as it is, has so far refused to recognize the new military regimes in stark contrast to the practice of its predecessor the Organization of African Unity. Although the prospect of not being invited to regional meetings is unlikely to mortify prospective coup leaders, this step by the African Union helps to legitimize more effective actions.
The key developments have been American. In October 2008 a new American military force specifically for Africa, AFRICOM, was activated. Currently it is small, with only 3,600 troops, and its bases on the continent are still being finalized. Although it is unlikely that this force will be used to depose established thuggish regimes or even to protect populations threatened by them, it could nevertheless play an important role in protecting genuinely democratic governments. But the biggest change is the election of an African-American president. As a result, America has suddenly acquired huge legitimacy on the continent. Interventions sanctioned by President Barack Obama would be robustly protected from accusations of neo-colonialism.
This conjunction of new circumstances makes it much easier for the U.S. to introduce an undertaking of “best efforts” to defend democratically elected governments from coups. This is a realistic role for AFRICOM: Who is going to object? Governments covered by this undertaking would be required to permit international monitoring of their elections, but many already do. The problem has been that these assessments have not been linked to any significant consequence.
The potency of this carrot is that it turns automatically into a stick. If an incumbent stole an election the undertaking would need to be withdrawn—publicly. Thus, the protection of decently elected governments unavoidably, and almost inadvertently, invites coups against crooked governments. Following the last year of coups, presidents tempted to steal the next election know all too well that such invitations would not be declined. African presidents are not sufficiently fearful of us to be threatened into denying themselves the advantages of crooked tactics, but they are fearful of their own armies.
Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University, is the author of “Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places” and “The Bottom Billion.”
This article was initially published in the Wall Street Journal
