- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Journal of African Elections
Journal of African Elections

The Journal of African Elections is an interdisciplinary biannual publication of research and writing in the human sciences which seeks to promote a scholarly understanding of developments and change in Africa. The journal is published by the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa.
Publisher | Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA) |
---|---|
Frequency | Bi-annually |
Coverage | Vol 2 Issue 1 Apr 2003 - current |
Accreditation(s) |
Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) |
Language | French/English |
Journal Status | Active |
Collection(s) |
-
-
Election 2019: Change and Stability in South Africa’s Democracy, Collette Schulz-Herzenberg and Roger Southall (Eds.)
The South African national and provincial election of May 2019 was a watershed in South Africa’s ongoing process of democratisation. It was also the most analysed election in the democratic era before the actual voting took place. Numerous attempts to predict the result demonstrate how high the stakes were and still are for all the parties and citizens, rich and poor, in South Africa. As is to be expected, the pollsters and their instruments failed to capture the dynamics of voting and the actual result. Of interest were alternative approaches to predicting the outcome. These entailed examining party performance in past elections (national, provincial and local as well as local by-elections) based on voting station and ward data. I dare say that these approaches got close to being accurate.
-
-
-
Opinion - the world Robert Mugabe left behind
Being in Harare, Zimbabwe, as the news came through that Robert Mugabe had died, was in many ways a welcome and anti-climactic experience. If that was my personal sense – as a Commonwealth official who supervised the observation of the independence elections from January to March 1980 when he came to power, and who has visited Zimbabwe almost 70 times since – it seemed also to be the mood of the city. Harare remained quiet. The news came at night, too late for the newspapers that had already gone to press. Not everyone has wi-fi access, many of those who do face constant electricity cuts and cannot recharge their cell phones or computers, so the news spread to a large extent by word of mouth. If there was one intangible sense that hung in the air, it was a sense that this was about time. Mugabe had hung around too long. And even though he had been ousted from power in 2017, his shadow had clung to Zimbabwe.
-
-
-
The manifesto experiment and internal electioneering in the Botswana Democratic Party
Written manifestos seem to be a rarity in intra-political party electioneering in Africa, and there is a view that African party electioneering is largely nonissue based, instead being personality-driven. This article observes that the phenomenon seems applicable even to Africa’s supposed ‘senior democracy’, Botswana. Yet, the enduring, issueless factional electioneering of the long-ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) resulted in a significant, albeit one-off, interregnum in 2015. In the 2014 general elections, the combined opposition had garnered 53% of the popular vote, while the BDP received just 47%. The BDP managed to hold onto power, however, due to the country’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system. This development appears to have shaken and confused the elites of the BDP and caused concern among the party’s hard-line factionalists. Subsequently, Botsalo Ntuane did extremely well in the party’s 2015 central committee elections. In an unprecedented move he competed for the influential position of secretary general as an independent candidate and with an actual policy manifesto. This move was outside of the traditional factional sponsorship method long-dominant within the BDP. However, the factionalists soon regrouped and acted to marginalise him and his manifesto. Ntuane consequently performed quite poorly in the later 2017 elections, which once again were fought along strict factional lines with no space for ideas or policies. This article argues that Ntuane’s manifesto may have been perceived as too radical and unacceptably ambitious by the conservative party elites. This manifesto also seems to have threatened entrenched personal interests and corrupt practices within the BDP-led government. The article concludes with a note on the dynamics and results of the 2019 general elections.
-
-
-
The 2019 South African elections - incumbency and uncertainty
The 2019 South African elections marked the country’s sixth iteration of free and fair electoral contests since its democratisation in 1994. Although the outcome gives the African National Congress (ANC) yet another five-year mandate, the party has not gone unchallenged at the polls. It registered its lowest national vote share since the transition, a major concern for the party of liberation. The most recent contest also demonstrates the resilience of the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and the continued upward trajectory of its closest rival, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). In this article, we analyse available survey data on South Africans’ attitudes and offer some empirical answers to account for the election results. We argue that race continues to feature prominently in electoral decision-making but it does so in ways that deviate slightly from conventional wisdom. Further, we put forth an explanation that the parties’ leaders played a central role in shaping citizens’ voting behaviour, especially among their own partisan supporters.
-
-
-
Facebook image-making in Zimbabwe’s 2018 election campaigns - social media and emerging trends in political marketing
This article explores changing political communication and marketing trends in Zimbabwe when presidential candidates used Facebook to reach out, largely to the youth and urban voters, during the 2018 election campaign. Recent studies have identified the power of social media as a platform on which politicians portray images that convince the electorate to vote for them. These images can be created through the photographs, video footage and texts that politicians post on their Facebook pages. The study employed a qualitative approach to establish the role played by political imagery used by contesting parties and candidates in the campaign period ahead of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe, in particular the frontrunners and larger political parties. MDC-Alliance presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa and Zanu-PF candidate Emmerson Mnangagwa were both serious contenders for the presidency. The analysis sheds light on the implications of image-making and modern political trends in Zimbabwe and how Facebook manages to reach out to the targeted electorate.
-
-
-
Political parties and electoral offences in Nigeria - a critical analysis
The paper examines the Nigerian Constitution and Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) on the role and complicity of political parties in electoral offences in Nigeria. It explores the extent to which political party activities or inactions constitute or contribute to electoral offences. The objective is to find out whether political parties are complicit in electoral offences, and whether the Electoral Act needs to be reformed to accommodate political party culpability, reduce the criminal complicity of political parties, and improve political party accountability. The paper adopts a mixed method of normative and critical analysis. Normative analysis arises from examination of doctrinal data which consist of the principles of law, provisions of the Electoral Act 2010 and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (CFRN) 1999 and other relevant laws regarding jurisprudence in democracy and constitutionalism, in order to determine their coherence and validity. Critical analysis, on the other hand, is applied to electoral and democratic principles in extant literature and policy in order to justify the necessity of reforming electoral laws. The paper finds that the Electoral Act is silent in many instances of potential political party complicity in electoral offences. However, the law could be reformed to improve political party accountability and reduce the incidence of electoral offences in Nigeria. It recommends some policy reforms and amendments to improve the effectiveness of the Electoral Act 2010.
-

© Publisher: Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA)

© Publisher: Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA)