To supplement this session, I attended an IDD Guest Seminar Series talk on the ‘The State of Democracy: Perspectives from recent elections’ (Beardsworth, 2018). This helped to frame my understanding of democratisation in the Global South ahead of our seminar with Nic Cheeseman, and offered insights into the case of Zimbabwe.  

Is ‘electoral fallacy’ on the rise?

With multi-party elections on the increase, but without corresponding rises in election quality, it would certainly seem so. What really struck me was seeing just how much of the world suffers from declining electoral quality, or even holds none at all.

This has direct implications for the quality of democracy and therefore development in the Global South.

Does democracy work?

Democracy’s instrumental value in leading to greater accountability and service delivery, and thereby producing states with better governments and societies has been contested (Cheeseman, 2015). Such assumptions have been called into question by de Kadt and Lieberman (2017) in Southern Africa, who show a negative correlation between improved service delivery and government support because of pervasive corruption. Such messy political realities juxtapose the lofty ideals of democratisation, indicating the dangerous short-termism of elections in the South. Furthermore, along with Lindberg’s work in Ghana (2003), they indicate the strong connections between democratisation and neopatrimonial networks in development politics as a whole. So does this help democracy or merely undermine it?

Is democracy dying?

Thinking back to the discussion at the IDD talk, I would say it undermines it. Hopes were high for a ‘New Dispensation’ after the resignation of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe in 2017, but corruption, vote rigging and electoral violence broke out, demonstrating there was nothing ‘new’ at all, and the ‘dark side’ of elections persisted (Beardsworth, 2018). I have found this week particularly interesting, and so I aim to apply much of what I have learned to the ‘Governance and Statebuilding’ module I have chosen next term.

References

Beardsworth, N. (2018) The State of Democracy: Perspectives from recent elections. IDD Guest Seminar Series, 6th November 2018.

Cheeseman, N. (2015) Democracy in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

de Kadt, D. and Lieberman, E.S. (2017) ‘Nuanced Accountability: Voter Responses to Service Delivery in Southern Africa’, British Journal of Political Science, pp. 1-31.

Lindberg, S. I. (2003) ‘It’s Our Time to” Chop’: Do Elections in Africa Feed Neo-Patrimonialism rather than Counter-Act It? Democratization 10(2): 121-140.