International Journal of Asian Social Science, 2013, 3(7):1625-1636 International Journal of Asian Social Science ISSN(e): 2224-4441/ISSN(p): 2226-5139 journal homepage: http://www.aessweb.com/journal-detail.php?id=5007 DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION AND ELECTORAL VIOLENCE IN TOGO ABOUDOU MamanTachiwou Université de Lomé, Faculté des Sciences Economiques et de Gestion (FASEG), LOME – TOGO ABSTRACT Following the presidential election held in Togo on April 24, 2005, after the death in office of long- time president Gnassingbé Eyadéma, unprecedented levels of violence erupted across the country adding to the history of troubled elections in Africa. This paper investigates the Togolese presidential election of 2005, which is to date the smallest election held in Africa and one seriously marred by violence. The study was conducted following the methodology as under: Collecting, sorting and analyzing secondary information relating political history of the country. We find that 5% of Togolese were affected by the violence regardless of their ethnicity and wealth. The chances of being a victim of violence were higher in where politically-connected gangs operated. Violence, which was mainly triggered by the perception that the election had been rigged, reduced trust and social capital among communities making violence more likely to reoccur. The main finding is that treating electoral violence as a criminal matter or a cyclical phenomenon is not likely to end future elections from being violent. The more robust approach of adopting postelection political agreements in Togo showed early promise, but the protests following the recently held elections in Togo show a continuing institutional weakness for managing electoral conflict. © 2013 AESS Publications. All Rights Reserved. Keywords: Violence, Conflict, Electoral Politics, Political Economy, Togo. JEL Codes: D72, D74, O55. 1. INTRODUCTION The slow growth of Togo over the period since Independence is now understood as being partly attributable to poor governance. Until the 1990s the predominant African political system was autocracy. As (Besley and Masayuki, 2007) show, while in some contexts autocracy has produced good economic performance, in Africa it has consistently been dysfunctional. During the 1990s many African autocracies were replaced by democracy. Given the dismal record of autocracy, there was a reasonable expectation that democracy would achieve both accountability and legitimacy, and thereby both improve economic performance and reduce proneness to political ISSN(e): 2224-4441/ISSN(p): 2226-5139 1625 © 2013 AESS Publications. All Rights Reserved. International Journal of Asian Social Science, 2013, 3(7):1625-1636 violence. However, the record of elections in Togo and other recent low-income democracies is not encouraging. Kudamatsu (2006) measures government performance by infant mortality and shows that, in Africa, elections produce no improvement except in the rare instances in which the incumbent is defeated. Collier and Dominic (2008) find that below per capita income of $2,750 democracy significantly increases proneness to civil war and various other manifestations of violence. A likely reason for the failure of most elections to discipline governments into improved performance is that the participants rely upon illegitimate strategies to victory. For example, the Kenyan elections of December 2007 aroused widespread international accusations that the parties had resorted to miscounting of votes, bribery, and intimidation. Although these strategies may have profound consequences for the failure of democracy to improve government performance, they are difficult to investigate beyond the level of the anecdotal. To date the clearest evidence concerns vote miscounting, since sufficiently large miscounting will show up as a discrepancy between opinion polls and outcomes. Evidence on vote buying has recently been analyzed through randomized experiments by Vicente (2007). While we provide evidence on both these strategies, the contribution of this paper is to apply the same approach to the use of violence to intimidate voters. The context for our analysis is the Togolese Presidential election of 2005. These elections were undoubtedly violent: over 500 people were killed in the course of it. However, the important issue is whether this was simply random inter-communal violence, or whether it was a systematic electoral strategy with systematic consequences for votes. The expression of electoral conflict and violence can occur at five intervals in an election chronology. − Identity conflict can occur during the registration process when refugees or other conflict- forced migrants cannot establish or re-establish their officially recognized identities. The result is that these populations can remain disenfranchised and outside of the political process and potentially provoking conflict within the process. − Campaign conflict can occur as rivals seek to disrupt the opponents‟ campaigns, intimidate voters and candidates, and use threats and violence to influence participation in the voting. As a survey of electoral events from 2005 will suggest, conflict among political rivals appears to have been the most common form of electoral conflict. − Balloting conflict can occur on Election Day when political rivalries are played out at the polling station. Steps can be taken to provide alternative means of balloting if particular groups or communities are exposed to violence or intimidation. − Results conflict can occur in disputes over election results and the inability of judicial mechanisms to resolve these disputes in a timely, fair, and transparent manner. The manner in which results are reported can also be a conflict issue. − Representation conflict can occur when elections are organized as “zero sum” events where “losers” are left out of participation in governance. As Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds state in their book Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies: The optima choice fo peacefully managing conflict depends on several identifiable factors specie to the country, including the way and degree to which ethnicity is politicized, the intensity of the conflict, and the demographic and 1626 © 2013 AESS Publications. All Rights Reserved. International Journal of Asian Social Science, 2013, 3(7):1625-1636 geographic distribution of ethnic groups. In addition, the electoral system that is most appropriate for initially ending internal conflict may not be the best one of longer-term conflict management. The purpose of this article is to assess the incidence, impacts and the dynamics of the 2005 electoral violence. The article seeks to provide light to understanding of who was affected by violence, what sort of issues triggered the violence and what were the consequences left by the electoral violence at community level. The majority of studies of conflict have tended to focus on cross-country comparisons, or in the case of country studies, to gather scant evidence, often anecdotal, which limits the understanding of what are the risk factors for violence. This paper aims to contribute to the emerging field of micro-quantitative studies on conflict (Collier and Vicente, 2008; Barron et al., 2009; Bellows and Miguel, 2009) by assessing the individual and local factors that increased the risk of being a victim of electoral violence. The quantitative and qualitative data used allow us to draw a national representative perspective, with enough data at small area-level, to be able to assess how violence emerged and affected people at community level. Although the paper focuses on the experience of Togo, its findings have broader relevance as they reveal what sort of institutional failures led to violence and reflect policies that could be taken to reduce the recurrence of civil conflict. According to the self-reported incidence of violence in our surveys, violence affected about 5% of Togolese in terms of personal injury, being displaced from home, and destruction of property, loss of jobs or earnings or having a friend or relatives that died in the elections. The likelihood of being a victim of violence was not affected by the respondent‟s ethnicity or wealth but by where respondents lived. Respondents living in urban areas and in areas which had suffered land disputes before the election had a higher likelihood of being victims of violence. Violence was directly instigated by political actors and by politically connected gangs even before the elections. Nonetheless, the majority of respondents believe that violence was triggered mainly by the perception that the election had been rigged. The ordeal of the disputed election reduced trust across ethnic groups, a key element of social capital among communities. International experience has shown that in situations where (ethnic) groups distrust each other and are afraid of being victimized, this fear might drive them to resort to violence first in a preemptive move to minimize damage (Bardhan, 1997). Taking into account that having experienced conflict in the recent past is a good predictor for future conflict (Collier et al., 2008), Togo is at risk of experiencing violence in the future general elections if institutions are not strengthened to cope with the underlying grievances, the need for justice and the mistrust among ethnic groups. In Section 2 we give the definition of election violence. Section 3 we present the methodology of the study. Sections 4 describe the Togolese presidential election of 2005 and the official results