Patterns of Electoral Governance in Africas Emerging Democracies

SHAHEEN MOZAFFAR
ABSTRACT. This article describes and explains patterns of electoral governance in Africas emerging democracies through a systematic examination of election management bodies (EMBs), the formal units principally responsible for the organization and conduct of elections. The effectiveness of EMBs as institutional linchpins of electoral governance depends largely, but not exclusively, on their autonomy from the government. The article measures the degree of autonomy of EMBs as an indicator of the varying patterns of electoral governance in Africas emerging democracies and employs an ordered probit model to account for them. The model confirms the expected combined effects of the institutional legacies of colonial governance and postcolonial neopatrimonial regimes, ethnopolitical fragmentation and political negotiations over new democratic institutions on the relative autonomy of EMBs. Predicted probabilities calculated from the probit coefficients accurately predict the separate impact of each independent variable on the likelihood of African countries choosing non-autonomous, semiautonomous or autonomous EMBs. Keywords: Africa Democratization Election management bodies Elections Electoral governance

Elections, while commonplace, have a checkered history in sub-Saharan Africa. In the colonial period, very few elections were held and these were restricted to the European population and selected African elites. After 1945, the independence bargain struck between the departing European rulers and the emerging African nationalist elites led to the rapid extension of the franchise, and most African countries gained independence in the 1960s via competitive elections. Since then, competitive elections have been held regularly in long-standing democracies (Botswana, Mauritius, Gambia until 1994, and Senegal since 1979) and intermittently in countries that experienced alternating democratic governments
International Political Science Review (2002), Vol 23, No. 1, 85101
0192-5121 (2002/01) 23:1, 85101; 020425 2002 International Political Science Association SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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and military rule (such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone). 1 As authoritarian regimes steadily replaced democratic governments across the continent in the 1970s, single-party regimes held regular semi-competitive elections (as in Cte dIvoire, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia), while some military regimes organized tightly controlled plebiscitary elections to secure nominal legitimacy (Chazan, 1979; Collier 1982; Hayward, 1987; Nohlen, Krennerich, and Thibaut, 1998). Since 1989, however, the spread of democracy in sub-Saharan Africa has endowed competitive elections with special significance. They have become the organized method of peaceful democratic transition, a salient indicator of democratic consolidation, and the principal institutionalized means for large numbers of people to participate peacefully in forming and changing democratic governments afterwards. Credible competitive elections have thus become a necessary, albeit insufficient, source of behavioral, if not attitudinal, legitimacy in Africas emerging democracies (Diamond, 1999). This significance of competitive elections also underscores the empirical importance and the analytical challenge of electoral governance in contemporary Africa. Empirically, effective electoral governance is obviously crucial in securing credible elections. But, as the controversies surrounding the results of the 2000 US presidential elections in Florida showed, electoral governance attracts critical scrutiny when it occasionally produces bad elections, not when it routinely

produces good ones (Mozaffar and Schedler, this issue). In Africas fragile democracies, however, the characteristic uncertainties of democratic transitions and the resulting strategic dilemma of accommodating the inherent tension between legitimacy and control that exists in political life magnify the significance of the routine causal link between the effectiveness of electoral governance and the credibility of democratic elections. Reinforcing this magnified significance, extensive international election monitoring activities and assessments documented in technical reports, as well as the associated influx of large amounts of financial and technical assistance, attest, usually correctly, to the weakness of electoral governance as an important cause of flawed elections and hence to the necessity of creating effective systems of electoral governance in these democracies.2 Analytically, the challenge is to provide theoretical grounding to the practical concerns with improving electoral governance found in the extant literature on the topic with systematic examination of the origins, unfolding political logic, and outcomes of the structures and processes of electoral governance (Elklit and Reynolds, 2000; Lehoucq and Molina, forthcoming).3 This requires framing the problematic of electoral governance in terms of two broad and related tasks. The first involves the systematic clarification of how the strategic calculations of political actors interact with path-dependent contingencies and contextual factors to shape the choice of rules that configure the institutional framework of electoral governance. The second involves examining the impact of the structures and processes that make up this framework on securing credible democratic elections by keeping their outcomes within the unacknowledged margins of error that exist in all democratic elections without substantially affecting those outcomes. I undertake the first task in this article. My main goals are (a) to provide a systematic overview of the structural patterns of electoral governance in contemporary Africa, and (b) offer some tentative explanations for these patterns. I focus specifically on election management bodies (EMBs), the formal units
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principally responsible for the organization and conduct of democratic elections, as the most salient indicator of the structure of electoral governance. The task I undertake in this article is also logically prior to the systematic examination of the impact of the structures and processes of electoral governance on the credibility of democratic elections. No systematic inventory or analysis of the structural patterns of electoral governance in contemporary Africa exists at the present time. To my knowledge, this article represents the first attempt to fill this gap in the extant literature. I organize the presentation in the following way. I begin by clarifying the central theoretical concerns that inform the systematic analysis of electoral governance. The section following presents the research design, describing the data, identifying the key variables and specifying their expected relationship. The section after that presents the data analysis by describing the pattern of electoral governance in terms of the degree of autonomy of EMBs and relying on an ordered probit model to account for this pattern. I conclude by discussing the implications for the systematic analysis of electoral governance and its role in securing credible democratic elections in Africa.

Context, Contingency, and Choice

To democratize is to craft institutions, the sets of rules that structure strategic interactions and shape political outcomes (DiPalma, 1990). In democratizing countries, the choice of electoral rules is one of the most important institutional choices political actors make. This choice involves decisions about two

conceptually distinct but empirically related sets of electoral rules. One set defines, among other things, electoral formulas, district magnitudes, constituency boundaries, and assembly size. These rules endogenously structure electoral competition by encouraging strategic coordination among voters, parties and candidates over votes and seats (Cox, 1997; Lijphart, 1994; Taagepera and Shugart, 1989). The other set defines and configures the broad institutional framework of electoral governance. This framework consists of the structures and procedures that exogenously structure electoral competition by regulating, among other things, voter, party and candidate registration, election observation, campaign finance and media access, voting, the counting, tabulation and reporting of results, and the adjudication of electoral disputes (Katz, 1997: 107118; Maley, 2000; Mozaffar and Schedler, this issue). As with all democratic institutions, the choice of electoral governance rules in emerging democracies represents the combined effects of (a) the strategic calculations of key political actors, (b) the social structural context that defines their power relations, and (c) the path contingencies that shape the trajectories and outcomes of democratic transitions (Colomer, 2000; Karl, 1990; Karl and Schmitter, 1991; ODonnell and Schmitter, 1986; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longreth 1992). Democratization confronts political actors with the strategic dilemma of establishing democracy as a system of organized uncertainty (Przeworski, 1991). Competitive elections are the quintessential manifestation of organized uncertainty in a democracy. The legitimacy of competitive elections rests on the institutionalization of procedural certainty to secure substantive uncertainty. Political actors will accept the uncertainty of outcomes in electoral competition if they are certain that the rules for organizing the competition will not pre-determine the outcomes. Electoral governance rules provide this procedural certainty.
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Precisely because electoral governance entails the organization of electoral uncertainty, and hence the provision of procedural certainty that underpins free and fair elections, the formulation and implementation of electoral governance rules are of particular concern for political actors in emerging democracies. In Africas emerging democracies, for example, the controversies and disputes surrounding transitional elections focused principally and uniformly on such issues as pro-incumbent bias in rule application, inflated or incomplete voter rolls, and restrictions on opposition access to state-controlled media (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997: 201203; McMahon, 1994). Opposition groups, in particular, place a high premium on effective electoral governance because of their manifest political and organizational disadvantage vis--vis authoritarian incumbents. For their part, authoritarian incumbents ideally prefer not to hold competitive elections at all. But when forced to hold them, they prefer rules that help to reduce the uncertainty of electoral competition and ensure their own victory. But even this constrained strategic choice opens up the potential for devising electoral governance rules that provide some semblance of procedural legitimacy in transitional elections. In the absence of systematic fraud and willful manipulation of the election process, a strategic convergence of opposition and incumbent interests in credible elections thus obtains and facilitates the crafting of electoral governance rules in democratizing countries (Chao and Myers, 2000; Jones Luong, 2000; Mozaffar and Vengroff, forthcoming; Schedler, 1999). This strategic convergence, however, does not reflexively determine the precise configuration of electoral governance rules that opposition groups and authoritarian incumbents are likely to craft. In contemporary Africa, for instance, variations in the institutional legacies of colonial rule, in the political legacies of postcolonial authoritarian regimes, and in the resulting pattern of social cleavages constrained the design options of new democratic institutions. These wider pathdependent context and political contingencies also shaped the power relations

and conflicting institutional preferences that informed the political negotiations between opposition groups and authoritarian incumbents over new democratic institutions. These negotiations facilitated strategic convergence over the choice of new electoral governance rules. The institutional hallmark of authoritarian regimes in postcolonial Africa was neopatrimonialism, a system of governance based on the monopoly of state power and resources (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997: 6168).4 Within this general framework of neopatrimonial rule, institutional legacies of colonial rule distinguished African authoritarian regimes. Regimes in anglophone countries inherited a legacy of institutional devolution whereby the government authority delegated by the metropole to the colonial executive was implemented according to the specific circumstances of each colony (Young, 1994: 114). Especially significant was the normative (and often real) separation of politics and administration that underpinned the relatively decentralized organization of British colonial governance. This separation was a key institutional principle in the organization of numerous elections during decolonization and in the early postindependence period. As in other British colonies, principal responsibilities for the organization and conduct of these elections were typically delegated either to career civil servants with protected tenure of office (Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika [now Tanzania], and Uganda, among others) or to specially appointed electoral commissioners with the same qualifications and tenure of office as a judge of the High Court (Mauritius and the western region of Nigeria for the 1956
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regional elections, for example). With the exception of Sudan, anglophone African countries did not inherit autonomous EMBs at independence, although the legacy of institutional devolution and the normative separation of politics and administration presaged their adoption later (Smith, 1960). African authoritarian regimes in francophone as well as in lusophone countries inherited the centralized institutional legacy inspired by Jacobin statist ideology (Young, 1994: 114). While the implementation of this ideology in African colonies required pragmatic accommodation with local realities, the central organizing principle remained the integration of politics and administration through corporatist modes of interest mediation whereby specified social groups and functional interests (labor, students, women, teachers, civil servants) were formally organized into state-sponsored peak associations as representational monopolies closely tied to the ruling parties. Principal responsibility for electoral governance in the numerous elections in francophone Africa during decolonization rested typically with the ministry of the interior or territorial administration. At the local level, multiparty electoral committees chaired by designated administration officials supervised such routine activities as the revision of electoral lists, distribution of voters cards, and poll monitoring (Holleaux, 1956; Nicholas, 1956; Smith, 1960: 6). Virtually all francophone countries in Africa inherited this centralized institutional legacy of non-autonomous EMBs. Variations in rates of political participation and political competition, as reflected in presidential and legislative elections and in the structure of party systems, also distinguished neopatrimonial regimes in postcolonial Africa. Competitive single-party regimes, for instance, encouraged moderate rates of political participation in multicandidate competitive elections. Plebiscitary oneparty systems mobilized high rates of political participation in non-competitive plebiscitary elections. And military oligarchies pursued exclusionary strategies that tended to replace elections with occasional attempts at populist mobilization through tightly regulated ratification elections to secure nominal legitimacy for autocratic rule. In addition, settler oligarchies in Namibia and South Africa held

competitive elections restricted entirely to the small white minority populations. Finally, some African countries that experienced short-lived democratic governments (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, among others) also held multiparty elections (Bratton and van de Walle, 1997). Bratton and van de Walle have shown (1997: 140147) that the total number of elections and level of party competition in authoritarian regimes were positively related to the political protest that precipitated the post-1989 democratic transitions in Africa. These varied political legacies, therefore, can also be expected to affect the choice of EMBs in Africas emerging democracies in discernible ways. However, prevailing social cleavages defining the political interests and power relations of authoritarian incumbents and opposition groups are likely to mediate these lingering effects of colonial rule and postcolonial authoritarian regimes on the choice of new democratic institutions. In contemporary Africa, as elsewhere, ethnopolitical cleavages remain the salient, but neither an exclusive nor a reflexive, determinant of political interests and group organization because of their comparative advantage (vis--vis class) in reducing collective action costs. Variations in the institutional incentives and policy responses of African postcolonial regimes have been the principal determinants of the mobilization of ethnicity as a strategic resource by political actors to reduce collective action costs and improve group coordination in the competition for power and resources.
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Institutional accommodation of ethnopolitical demands, as a result, has been the principal hallmark of African politics (Mozaffar, 1995; Mozaffar and Scarritt, 1999: 243247; Rothchild, 1997; Rothchild and Olorunsola, 1983). In the recent wave of democratization, ethnopolitical cleavages have played an important role in shaping the institutional preferences of contending actors and structuring the political negotiations over the design of new democratic institutions (Mozaffar, 1998, 1999, 2000; Mozaffar and Scarritt, 2000; Reynolds, 1999; Scarritt, McMillan, and Mozaffar, 2001; Sisk, 1995; Sisk and Reynolds, 1998). The structure of ethnopolitical cleavages can therefore be expected to affect the choice of EMBs as well. Finally, political negotiations over the design of new democratic institutions also animated the process of democratization in contemporary Africa. These negotiations often produced elaborate political pacts crafted to settle protracted civil conflicts (Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa). But they also involved more limited agreements over the specific designs of new democratic institutions, although the process and outcomes of these negotiations were linked to the relative power capabilities of contending groups (Mozaffar, 2000; Reynolds, 1999; Seely, 2000; Sisk, 1995). Consequently variations in such political negotiations should also be expected to produce variations in the choice of EMBs.

Research Design
The preceding discussion suggests, then, that four related variables are likely to affect the choice of EMBs in Africas emerging democracies: (1) the institutional legacies of colonial rule; (2) the political legacies of postcolonial authoritarian regimes; (3) ethnopolitical cleavages defining the power relations and institutional preferences of key political actors; and (4) the resulting political negotiations over the institutional design of the EMBs as reflected in their relative autonomy from the government.

Measuring the Dependent Variable: EMB Autonomy

To examine the impact of these four variables, I focus specifically on the institutional location of EMBs as the key indicator of electoral governance rules. Their institutional location situates EMBs at the intersection of the constitutional and statutory provisions that authorize the institutional framework of democratic

governance and the structures and processes that create and maintain the enabling environment for effective electoral governance. EMBs, in other words, are the principal instruments for organizing credible election processes, linking voters and governments in structured exchanges of support and policy, authority, and accountability. Hence, they constitute the organizational anchor that secures the procedural legitimacy for the substantive uncertainty inherent in competitive elections. They are now increasingly viewed as the linchpin of effective electoral governance in new as well as established democracies. Indeed, there is a global trend toward the creation of EMBs as independent and permanent electoral commissions, even in countries, such as the ones in francophone Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, that do not have a tradition of organizational and functional autonomy for such bodies (Lpez-Pintor, n.d.). The institutional location of EMBs is a measure of the extent of their political autonomy vis--vis the government, specifically the executive. The combination of
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institutional location and associated political autonomy engenders a three-fold typology of (1) non-autonomous EMBs located within the formal government bureaucracy, (2) semi-autonomous EMBs located within the formal government bureaucracy but under the supervision of an autonomous body established specifically for that purpose, and (3) autonomous EMBs otherwise also known as independent electoral commissions. To measure the relative autonomy of the EMBs in Africa, I examined and coded the distribution of authority over the organization and conduct of elections between the formal government bureaucracy and a separate body (such as an electoral commission) specifically created for that purpose. I focused specifically on the extent of separation and overlap of authority over operational activities on the one hand, and strategic planning, supervision and policy coordination on the other. To the extent that both sets of activities were fused and authority over them invested completely in a government ministry, usually the ministry of interior or the ministry of territorial administration, an EMB was considered as nonautonomous and coded with a score of zero. Increasingly, however, reflecting the global trend and largely under domestic popular pressure, many francophone and lusophone African countries without an institutional tradition of autonomous electoral governance have moved in the direction of creating electoral commissions with varying degrees of authority. In Senegal, for instance, the Observatoire National des Elections has broad supervisory authority but no technical responsibility for organizing and conducting elections, which rests entirely within the ministry of territorial administration. Elsewhere, broadly representative national election commissions exist but are usually presided over by the officials from the ministry of interior (Niger) or the ministry of territorial administration (Central African Republic). In these instances of bifurcated authority, EMBs were considered as semi-autonomous and coded with a score of one. Finally, constitutional and statutory provisions in many African countries invest fused operational authority as well as strategic and supervisory responsibility exclusively in electoral commissions. The fusion and extent of such authority and responsibility vary, however, from a constitutionally mandated permanent electoral commission with its own bureaucracy and complete authority over the organization and conduct of all elections (as in Ghana) to an electoral commission with fixed but renewable term that is also proportionally representative and possesses complete authority over a separate technical bureaucracy responsible for the routine organization and conduct of all elections (as in South Africa). These EMBs were considered as autonomous and coded with a

score of two.

Measuring the Independent Variables

I measure the four independent variables in the following way. (1) I code colonial institutional legacy as a dummy variable, with anglophone legacy scored as one and the others zero. I expect countries with anglophone legacies to be more likely to choose autonomous EMBs than countries with nonanglophone legacies. (2) I measure the political legacies of postcolonial authoritarian regimes in terms of the frequency of previous elections held and the degree of political competition permitted in them. I expect the two measures to have opposite effects
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on the choice of autonomous EMBs. The finding of a positive effect of elections on democratic transitions (noted above) implies a similar effect on the choice of EMBs, but most of these elections were held under authoritarian regimes with no concern for accountability and transparency in the organization of (even multiparty) elections. I expect, therefore, that the number of previous elections, measured by their frequency, is likely to be inversely related to the choice of autonomous EMBs. However, I expect that the degree of political competition, measured by a competitive index, will be positively related to the choice of autonomous EMBs. Political competition under authoritarian regimes even as it created opportunities for political participation also heightened the negative valence of restrictions on these opportunities and provided valuable organizational experiences and resources for deployment in support of liberalization in democratic transitions. (3) I expect that high ethnopolitical fragmentation, measured by a fragmentation index, will be positively, and low fragmentation negatively, related to the choice of autonomous EMBs. Consistent with the findings of extant literature, high ethnopolitical fragmentation typically increases the salience of institutional autonomy as a constraint on any single ethnopolitical group monopolizing state power and resources. Such pressures are typically rendered moot in more homogeneous systems. (4) I expect that the incidence of political negotiations (coded one) is more likely to foster autonomous EMBs than their absence (coded zero). The Appendix provides complete descriptions of the variables, operationalization, and data sources.

Statistical Procedures
In the next section, I first describe the patterns of electoral governance by classifying EMBs in forty African countries (as of 1998) according to the degree of their autonomy. I then estimate an ordered probit model to account for these patterns and present predicted probabilities of the likelihood of an African country choosing a non-autonomous, semi-autonomous or an autonomous EMB due to the separate impact of each independent variable. An ordered probit model is an appropriate statistical procedure here because the dependent variable, the degree of autonomy of EMBs, is a trichotomous variable (Winship and Mare, 1984). I used the CLARIFY program (Tomz, Wittenberg, and King, 1999; King, Tomz, and Wittenberg, 2000) to calculate the predicted probabilities. The quantitative analysis is based on N = 36 countries because of inadequate data for Rwanda and because democratic transitions occurred before 1989 in Botswana, Mauritius, Senegal and Zimbabwe.

Analysis
Table 1 presents data on patterns of electoral governance as measured by the degree of autonomy of EMBs in forty African countries. Overall, the data show that African countries reflect the global trend toward autonomous EMBs. Slightly over

half (51 percent) of African EMBs are fully autonomous, compared to 29 percent that are semi-autonomous and 20 percent that are non-autonomous. The data also reflect a broad, but not a uniform, correlation between the countries institutional legacies and the degree of autonomy of their EMBs.
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Virtually all anglophone countries (except Seychelles) with decentralized institutional legacies have adopted autonomous EMBs, while countries with the centralist institutional legacies of France, Portugal, or Spain (Equatorial Guinea) have generally but not consistently adopted semi-autonomous or non-autonomous EMBs. However, anglophone Botswana, one of Africas longest-standing democracies, did not adopt a fully autonomous EMB until a constitutional amendment in 1997 established an independent electoral commission with extensive operational and supervisory authority. Before that, the supervisor of elections established in 1987 was responsible for elections. And before that, a permanent secretary in the office of the president had been responsible for elections since independence in 1966 (Lpez-Pintor, n.d.: 29). Similarly, in Ghanas checkered democratic history, a department in the ministry of local government was responsible for organizing elections between 1950 and 1968. Between 1968 and 1982, an electoral commissioner held that responsibility, except for 197677 when the military transferred the responsibility to the ministry of local government. Between 1982 and 1992, a 21-member populist national commission for democracy organized restricted local elections. In 1992 an 11-member interim electoral commission was established to organize the transitional democratic elections that year. It was replaced a year later by a constitutionally mandated 7member permanent body (Badu and Larvie, 1996). The absence of a uniform direct relationship between institutional legacies and autonomous EMBs is also evident in the case of francophone Benin and Mali as well
MOZAFFAR: Electoral Governance in African Democracies 93 TABLE 1. The Degree of Autonomy of Election Management Bodies in Africa, 1998. Non-autonomous Semi-autonomous Autonomous Cameroon Burkina Faso Angola Congo Burundi Benin Cte dIvoire Cape Verde Botswanaa Guinea Central African Republic Gambia Djibouti Chad Ghana Mauritania Comoros Guinea-Bissau Rwandaa Equatorial Guinea Kenya Seychelles Gabon Lesotho Madagascar Liberia Niger (1993) Malawi Senegala Mali Togo Mauritiusa Mozambique Namibia Nigeria So Tom Sierra Leone South Africa Tanzania Zambia Zimbabwea N = 8 (20%) N = 12 (29%) N = 21 (51%)
a These

countries are not included in the quantitative analysis because of inadequate data (Rwanda) or because democratic transitions occurred before 1989 (Botswana, Mauritius, Senegal, Zimbabwe).
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as the lusophone countries of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, So Tom and Mozambique,

all of which with strong centralist institutional traditions chose autonomous EMBs through political negotiations precipitated by popular protest (Benin, Mali, Guinea-Bissau), preemptive elite reform (So Tom), and civil war (Angola and Mozambique). While both Namibia and South Africa also adopted autonomous EMBs consistent with their anglophone institutional legacies, the extended political negotiations that led to pacted democratic transitions in both countries also produced the ethnic, racial and gender proportionality in EMB membership that was inconsistent with their majoritarian institutional traditions. Table 2 presents results of the ordered probit estimates as a systematic measure of the expected effects of the four independent variables on the choice of EMBs. I estimate the following ordered probit model:
Prob(yi = j) = b0 + b1 + b2 + b3 + b4 + b5 + e Where: Prob(yi = j) = probability that the country will fall in one of the three categories of the dependent variable (non-autonomous, semi-autonomous, autonomous) b0 = constant b1 = colonial institutional legacy b2 = previous elections b3 = political competition b4 = ethnopolitical fragmentation b5 = institutional negotiations e = error term

The overall model is robust and confirms the expected relationship between the specified independent variables and the choice of EMBs. All variables are correctly signed and statistically significant. Colonial institutional legacy clearly turns out to be the most powerful and significant predictor. Previous elections and political competition are also significant predictors. While ethnopolitical fragmentation has the weakest statistically significant effect at p = .09, it is nevertheless within the acceptable p = .10 level. We are thus able to confirm that countries with high ethnopolitical fragmentation are more likely to choose autonomous EMBs than countries with low fragmentation. Similarly, the likelihood of countries adopting autonomous EMBs increases with the incidence of political negotiations over new democratic institutions.
94 International Political Science Review 23(1) TABLE 2. Ordered Probit Estimates of the Choice of Election Management Bodies in Africa. Independent variables Coefficients Standard errors Colonial institutional legacy 2.695*** .773 Previous elections .410*** .115 Political competition 1.026** .419 Ethnopolitical fragmentation 1.116* .652 Institutional negotiations .979** .504 Number of cases 36 Log likelihood 22.093 Wald chi-square 32.79 Prob. chi-square .000 Pseudo R2 .403
*p<.10, **p<.05, ***p<.001
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The coefficients in Table 2 indicate whether an independent variable is significantly related to the choice of EMBs as well the direction of this relationship. But they do not indicate the strength of the relationship. We can get a measure of the strength of the relationship between each independent variable and the choice of EMBs by converting the probit coefficients into predicted probabilities that indicate the likelihood of an African country choosing one of the three categories of EMB due to the effect of an independent variable while the others are held constant at specified values. To calculate the predicted probabilities, each independent variable of interest was varied from its minimum to its maximum

value, while all the other variables were set either to their mean values for interval variables (previous elections, political competition, and ethnopolitical fragmentation) or to their modal values for nominal variables (institutional legacy and political negotiations). I also created an average or typical country by setting all independent variables to their mean or modal values and calculated the predicted probability that this average country would choose one of the three categories of EMB.5 Table 3 displays the results.
MOZAFFAR: Electoral Governance in African Democracies 95 TABLE 3. Predicted Probabilities of the Choice of Election Management Bodies in Africa. Independent variables Minimum Maximum Dependent variable categories Colonial institutional legacy Non-anglophone Anglophone Non-autonomous .345 .011 Semi-autonomous .507 .077 Autonomous .149 .912 Previous elections None Fourteen Non-autonomous .013 .981 Semi-autonomous .097 .018 Autonomous .890 .001 Political competition Low High Non-autonomous .717 .112 Semi-autonomous .260 .420 Autonomous .023 .468 Ethnopolitical fragmentation Low High Non-autonomous .543 .199 Semi-autonomous .389 .494 Autonomous .068 .307 Institutional negotiations No Yes Non-autonomous .105 .029 Semi-autonomous .446 .198 Autonomous .448 .773 Average probabilitiesa Non-autonomous .067 Semi-autonomous .373 Autonomous .559
a All

independent variables are set at mean or modal values. Average refers to central tendency and not to the arithmetic mean (see note 5). Note: For each estimate, all other variables are set to mean or modal values. Estimates were calculated with the CLARIFY program (Tomz, Wittenberg, and King, 1999) using 1000 simulations.
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The average probability calculations indicate that African countries were most likely to choose autonomous (56 percent) or semi-autonomous EMBs (37 percent). African countries thus reflect the global trend toward choosing EMBs with some degree of autonomy from executive control. As elsewhere, this choice in Africa seems to emanate from a convergence of popular pressure for accountability and transparency in the organization and conduct of democratic elections and growing recognition by incumbents of the need to secure some semblance of legitimacy in governing. The predicted probabilities also confirm the separate impact of the individual variables on the choice of EMBs. Again, institutional legacy shows a powerful effect. While 51 percent of non-anglophone countries with centralized institutional legacies were likely to adopt semi-autonomous EMBs, 91 percent of anglophone African countries with decentralized institutional legacies were likely to adopt fully autonomous EMBs. Similarly, a powerful impact is also evident for countries with a number of previous elections. An impressive 89 percent of African countries with no previous election experience were likely to choose autonomous, while 98 percent with extensive election experience were likely to choose non-autonomous EMBs.

Previous experience with political competition, even under the restrictions of authoritarian rule, has a powerful independent impact on the likelihood of African countries selecting autonomous EMBs. Of the countries with limited experience of political competition, 72 percent were likely to choose nonautonomous and only 2 percent were likely to choose autonomous EMBs. The percentages are dramatically reversed for countries with greater experience of political competition to 11 percent for non-autonomous and 47 percent for autonomous EMBs. If we include in the latter group the 42 percent of the countries that are likely to choose semi-autonomous EMBs (compared to 26 percent in the former group), the percentage of countries with political competition experience that are likely to choose autonomous or semi-autonomous EMBs is 89 percent compared to only 28 percent for countries with limited political competition experience. The probability that African countries with greater ethnopolitical homogeneity, that is, low degree of ethnopolitical fragmentation, will choose non-autonomous EMBs is high at 54 percent with a probability of 39 percent of these countries choosing semi-autonomous EMBs. The probabilities are reversed for countries with greater ethnopolitical heterogeneity, that is, a high degree of ethnopolitical fragmentation. Four-fifths of these countries are likely to opt for fully autonomous (31 percent) or semi-autonomous (49 percent) EMBs. The absence of institutional negotiations is likely to lead 45 percent of the countries to opt for autonomous and the same percentage for semi-autonomous EMBs. The presence of institutional negotiations, however, is likely to increase the probability of a country opting for autonomous EMBs to 77 percent. This reinforces the insights gained from the independent effects of previous political competition and the degree of ethnopolitical fragmentation that political considerations remain paramount in influencing the choice of EMBs in Africas emerging democracies.

Conclusion
While scholars have generally focused on such electoral system variables as electoral formulas and district magnitudes and their effects on the structure of
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party systems, patterns of political representation, and the creation of stable governments, political actors on the ground in new democracies as well as international donors dispensing technical and financial assistance to promote democracy have been more concerned with devising rules for effective electoral governance to secure credible elections. A principal goal of this thematic issue of the International Political Science Review is to bridge this gap between scholarship and practice by bringing the systematic study of electoral governance into the mainstream of comparative scholarship on democratization. To advance this goal, I have examined the pattern of electoral governance in Africa by employing the analytical tools in extant comparativist scholarship. As elaborated in the Introduction to this issue, electoral governance can be usefully conceptualized as a set of routine activities that provides voters, parties, and candidates engaged in strategic coordination over votes and seats with procedural certainty to legitimize the uncertainty of outcomes inherent in competitive elections. This singular role endows electoral governance with empirical relevance and analytical significance. That both authoritarian incumbents and opposition groups pay attention, albeit for different reasons, to the credibility of democratic elections in emerging democracies attests to the empirical relevance of electoral governance. The widespread emphasis opposition groups place on ensuring free and fair elections through effective electoral governance is understandable, given their traditional organizational disadvantage vis--vis authoritarian incumbents. Yet, authoritarian incumbents attempts to

manipulate election rules also indicate their understanding of the significance of these rules in shaping and legitimizing election outcomes. Analytically, conceptualizing electoral governance as a set of activities configured by rules (a) facilitates theorizing by situating it in the comparative literature on the new institutionalism, and (b) enables systematic examination of where electoral governance rules come from and the consequences they have for the credibility of elections in emerging democracies. In this article, I have made an initial attempt to examine the first question. Specifically, I have focused on EMBs as the most salient organizational instrument and manifestation of electoral governance. I first measured the relative autonomy of African EMBs and classified 41 African countries along a three-fold dimension of non-autonomous, semi-autonomous, and autonomous EMBs. I next hypothesized that four related independent variables found in the extant comparative democratization literature could account for this classification. The first variable concerned the institutional legacies of colonial rule as reflected in the decentralized tradition of British colonial governance and the centralized statist traditions of French, Portuguese and Spanish colonial governance. The second variable concerned the political legacies of authoritarian regimes in postcolonial Africa as measured by the number of elections and the degree of political competition they permitted. The third variable measured the structure of social cleavages in African countries in terms of the degree of ethnopolitical fragmentation. The fourth variable concerned the incidence or absence of political negotiations over new democratic institutions. An order probit model generally confirmed the hypothesized relationship between the independent variables and the choice of EMBs, while predicted probabilities calculated from the probit coefficients correctly indicated the separate impact of each independent variable on the probability of African
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party systems, patterns of political representation, and the creation of stable governments, political actors on the ground in new democracies as well as international donors dispensing technical and financial assistance to promote democracy have been more concerned with devising rules for effective electoral governance to secure credible elections. A principal goal of this thematic issue of the International Political Science Review is to bridge this gap between scholarship and practice by bringing the systematic study of electoral governance into the mainstream of comparative scholarship on democratization. To advance this goal, I have examined the pattern of electoral governance in Africa by employing the analytical tools in extant comparativist scholarship. As elaborated in the Introduction to this issue, electoral governance can be usefully conceptualized as a set of routine activities that provides voters, parties, and candidates engaged in strategic coordination over votes and seats with procedural certainty to legitimize the uncertainty of outcomes inherent in competitive elections. This singular role endows electoral governance with empirical relevance and analytical significance. That both authoritarian incumbents and opposition groups pay attention, albeit for different reasons, to the credibility of democratic elections in emerging democracies attests to the empirical relevance of electoral governance. The widespread emphasis opposition groups place on ensuring free and fair elections through effective electoral governance is understandable, given their traditional organizational disadvantage vis--vis authoritarian incumbents. Yet, authoritarian incumbents attempts to manipulate election rules also indicate their understanding of the significance of these rules in shaping and legitimizing election outcomes. Analytically, conceptualizing electoral governance as a set of activities configured by rules (a) facilitates theorizing by situating it in the comparative

literature on the new institutionalism, and (b) enables systematic examination of where electoral governance rules come from and the consequences they have for the credibility of elections in emerging democracies. In this article, I have made an initial attempt to examine the first question. Specifically, I have focused on EMBs as the most salient organizational instrument and manifestation of electoral governance. I first measured the relative autonomy of African EMBs and classified 41 African countries along a three-fold dimension of non-autonomous, semi-autonomous, and autonomous EMBs. I next hypothesized that four related independent variables found in the extant comparative democratization literature could account for this classification. The first variable concerned the institutional legacies of colonial rule as reflected in the decentralized tradition of British colonial governance and the centralized statist traditions of French, Portuguese and Spanish colonial governance. The second variable concerned the political legacies of authoritarian regimes in postcolonial Africa as measured by the number of elections and the degree of political competition they permitted. The third variable measured the structure of social cleavages in African countries in terms of the degree of ethnopolitical fragmentation. The fourth variable concerned the incidence or absence of political negotiations over new democratic institutions. An order probit model generally confirmed the hypothesized relationship between the independent variables and the choice of EMBs, while predicted probabilities calculated from the probit coefficients correctly indicated the separate impact of each independent variable on the probability of African
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countries choosing a non-autonomous, semi-autonomous or fully autonomous EMB. The results of the substantive analysis should not be treated as definitive. Both the data and the model specification that defines its theoretical foundation are preliminary attempts to provide analytical grounding for a neglected topic and need further refinement. Nor does this article analyze the impact of the choice of EMB on the credibility of elections and the legitimacy of their outcomes. Nevertheless, the analysis presented here suggests that existing analytical (conceptual, theoretical, and methodological) tools can be usefully employed in the systematic study and understanding of electoral governance and its role in securing credible elections among emerging democracies in Africa and elsewhere

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