THE IMPAC T OF ELECTION AD M I N I S T R AT I O N ON THE LEGITIMACY OF EMERGING DEMOCRACIES: A NE W RESEARCH AG E N D A Jørgen Elklit and Andrew Reynolds Working Paper #281 – September 2000 THE IMPAC T OF ELECTION AD M I N I S T R AT I O N ON THE LEGITIMACY OF EMERGING DEMOCRACIES: A NE W RESEARCH AG E N D A Jørgen Elklit and Andrew Reynolds Working Paper #281 – September 2000 Jørgen Elklit is a professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute during the fall term of 1999. Professor Elklit specializes in electoral systems, electoral politics and management, political parties, and political behavior. He has worked with election and democratization support consultancies and observation missions to more than 15 countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe since 1990. He was an international member of the South Af r i c a n Independent Electoral Commission in 1990 and is now, inter alia, an international expert advisor to the Independent Electoral Commission in Lesotho. Recent books include El e c t o r a l Systems for Emerging Democracies (Copenhagen: Danida, 1997) and Hvem stemmer—og hvem stemmer ikke? (Who Votes—and Who Doesn't?) (Aarhus: Magtudredningen, 2000, with Birgi t Mø l l e r , Palle Svensson, and Lise Tog e b y ) . An d r ew Reynolds is an assistant professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has written extensively on democratization and constitutional design and consulted on issues of electoral system design in South Af r i c a , Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Guyana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Jordan, and Fiji. His books include Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Af r i c a (Oxford, 1999), Elections and Conflict Management in Africa (c o e d i t o r , USIP, 1998), Election ’94 South Af r i c a (e d i t o r , St. Ma r t i n ’ s, 1994), and Election ’99 South Af r i c a (e d i t o r , St. Martin’s, 1999). The paper has benefited from comments from Bob Pastor, Rafael López-Pintor, An d r e a s Sc h e d l e r , and two anonymous referees. AB S T R A C T In this paper we attempt to push the development of a new subfield of research in the field of democratization and institutional design, which is the relationship between the institutionaliz- ation of electoral politics (and in particular the administration of elections) and the emerge n c e of democracy in the developing world. This new avenue of research represents an important advance in the study of causal relationships, which so far has either been completely neglected in the democratization canon or has only been given dramatically insufficient attention. The paper suggests a framework for the analysis of election management bodies that builds on a close scrutiny of the electoral management system’s performance during the twelve steps of the electoral process. This approach obviously leads to discussion of how the formation of policies in the electoral field can benefit from insights gained within the field of policy analysis, in particular within the field of implementation theory. A pilot study of recent elections in eight Sub-Saharan countries (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia) allows us to conclude that the framework—even though it yet has to be fully utilized—is helpful in coming to grips with the electoral processes in these cases. However, a full test requires more cases and more in-depth data collection than has been possible here. RE S U M E N En este artículo intentamos impulsar el desarrollo de un nuevo subcampo de investigación en los estudios de democratización y diseño institucional: la relación entre la institucionalización de la política electoral (en particular la administración de las elecciones) y la emergencia de la democracia en el mundo en desarrollo. Este nuevo camino de investigación representa un importante avance en el estudio de las relaciones causales, que hasta el momento ha sido o bien completamente ignorado en el canon de la democratización o bien ha recibido extraordinaria- mente insuficiente atención. El artículo sugiere un marco para el análisis de los cuerpos de administración electoral que se apoya en un cuidadoso examen del rendimiento del sistema de administración en los doce pasos del proceso electoral. Este abordaje obviamente lleva a la discusión de cómo la formación de las políticas en el campo electoral pueden beneficiarse de enseñanzas del campo de análisis de políticas, en particular en el campo de la teoría de la implementación. Un estudio piloto de elecciones recientes en ocho países del África Subsahariana (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Sierra Leona, Sudáfrica, Tanzania y Zambia) nos permite concluir que el marco—aunque todavía tienen que ser utilizado por completo—ayuda para aprehender los procesos electorales en estos casos. Sin embargo, una prueba completa del marco requiere más casos y información en profundidad de lo que aquí ha sido posible. This paper seeks to push the development of a new subfield of research in the field of democratization and institutional design, namely the relationship between the institu- tionalization of electoral politics—in particular the administration of elections—and the em e r gence of democracy in the developing world. The quality of an election in this regard is conceptualized as the extent to which the entire electoral process is seen as legitimate and binding by political actors. This new avenue of research represents an important advance in the study of causal relationships that to date have either been completely neglected in the democratization canon or have been given dramatically insufficient attention. There is general agreement among electoral scholars that the study of electoral systems and their importance to the democratic evolution of any state appears to have reached a point where far-reaching and new insights are few and far between. In 1984 the doyen of electoral system comparativists, Arend Lijphart, reviewed the state of the field, making a clarion call for scholars to trumpet the molding effe c t s electoral systems have upon party systems, the importance of electoral institutions to constitutional design, and accumulate knowledge through the development of systematic cross- national comparative research projects (Lijphart 1984). He noted that after “several decades of apparent moribundity” real vigor was being restored to the discipline engendered by the works of, for example, Gudgin and Taylor (1979), Katz (1980), Mackie and Rose (1982), and Nohlen (1978). Over the past more than fifteen years Lijphart’s call has been answered, and perhaps answered more strongly than what has been seen in any other subfield within comparative politics, so that, for all intents and purposes, the narrow study of the mathematical consequences of electoral laws has been exhausted. Ground breaking political science published by Cox, Gallagher, Grofman, Lijphart, Shugart and Taagepera, among others, has demonstrated psephological truths that make Duverg e r’s conjectures look more like ‘g u e s t i m a t e s ’ than ‘laws’. We now have a whole library of evidence to draw upon when analyzing the impact of the specific type of proportional representation formula on seat allocation, the effective threshold of votes needed to win seats in multimember and single- member district systems of all varieties, and the incestuous relationship among districting, registration, communal voting, and discrimination. In many respects the book can be closed, or at least set aside for a time, on the mathematical-technical consequences of electoral laws. After a decade or so of global diffusion of multiparty competitive politics it has been recognized more explicitly than previously (see, however, for an early work in this area, Jaramillo, Léon-Roesch, and Nohlen 1989) that the quality of electoral administration has a direct impact on the way in which elections in the developing world and their outcomes are regarded not merely by international observers, but also—and more importantly—by domestic actors such as voters, parties, media, and local observers (e.g., Lopéz-Pintor 1999, 139–40). These groups do not necessarily see things the same way; indeed their differential perceptions are useful as they allow us to gauge—at least partly—the reasons why different groups come out with variant judgements about the electoral exercise. It may be somewhat puzzling that studies of electoral administration and its impact on democratization have not been systematically undertaken before. One of several explanations suggested by Pastor (1999b) is that those who previously have worked with elections and democratization predominantly originate from countries where administrative issues are not at all problematic, and they have therefore not thought that it was necessary to include this variable (or these variables) in the analysis. However, a more powerful explanation revolves around the nature of the electoral administration issues themselves. These issues are purportedly less fascinating research topics than the development of democratization theory, the study of individual transition processes, the effects of various seat allocation systems, or surveying voters’ attitudes towards new regimes. Indeed, despite their salience to democratic stability in emerging polyarchies, election administration issues are probably more tedious to study and to document. While the canon of literature is tiny, the importance of the quality of election administration both as a theoretical issue and at the more management-oriented and policy- relevant level has not merely been addressed as a general issue (López-Pintor 1999; Pastor 1999a, 1999b; Elklit 1999; also some of the chapters in Nohlen, Picado, and Zovatto, comps.