Political Context and Political Participation Across the Lifespan in Africa

Gerontologists have long documented how age is associated with political participation. However, few studies have considered how macrocontextual factors shape participation across the life span. Moreover, very few studies have dealt with political engagement and aging in emerging democracies, including those in Africa. This study addresses those gaps, integrating the most recent three waves of Afrobarometer survey data (2011–2018) with country-level data from the freedom house (i.e. freedom index). Findings reveal that, at the individual level, an age gap widens for engagement in protests and shrinks for electoral and non-electoral political participation. When the political context is considered, however, we find that political freedom softens the drop-off of protest behavior at later ages. For electoral and non-electoral political participation, we find that freer countries lessen the expected growth in engagement across the life span. The study implies that political oppression shapes the links between age and political behaviour, but the processes seem different depending on whether they are engaging in risky (where the age gap widens) or non-risky (where the age gap shrinks) political forms of engagement.

Digital Media and Democracy: A Systematic Review of Causal and Correlational Evidence Worldwide

One of today's most controversial and consequential questions is whether the rapid, worldwide uptake of digital media is causally related to a decline in democracy. We conducted a systematic review of causal and correlational evidence (N=498 articles) on the link between digital media and different political variables, such as trust, polarization or news consumption. We further focused on the subset of articles that employed causal inference methods. Across methods, the articles report associations between digital media use and most political variables. Some associations, such as increases in political participation and information consumption, are likely to be beneficial for democracy and were often observed in the Global South and emerging democracies. Other consistently reported associations, such as declining political trust, advantages for populists, and growing polarization, are likely to be detrimental to democracy and were more pronounced in established democracies. We conclude that while the impact of digital media on democracy depends on the specific political variable and the political system in question, several variables show clear directions of associations. We believe that the evidence calls for further research efforts and vigilance by governments and civil societies to better understand and actively design the intimate interplay of digital media and democracy.

Nationalization and Ethnicization

The emerging world civil war is the subject of an extensive chapter on the interwar period and the Second World War. This phase was marked by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, there was the systematic codification and substantive expansion of political and social civil rights in the emerging democracies and social welfare states of Europe. Legal inequality between the sexes diminished; a social security net began to spread across all of Europe. On the other hand, these expanding rights were increasingly reserved for a country’s own citizens and thereby nationalized. This restrictive tendency escalated to the extreme with the race and class-based exclusion and extermination policies of the dictatorships in Europe’s “bloodlands” (Timothy Snyder) prior to the Second World War and intensified during its course. Citizenship changed its function and went from being an institution of governmental protection to one of discriminatory selection and extermination policy.

Accountable to whom? How strong parties subvert local democratic institutions

How do politicians in emerging democracies subvert institutional reforms that are designed to improve accountability? Looking at patron-client relations within political parties, I present a strategy, partisan accountability, by which strong parties undermine accountability to citizens. At the national level, parties build patronage networks. Central party organizations use their power and resources to build political machines that extend to the local level. Leveraging these patronage networks, national politicians co-opt local politicians into being accountable to central party interests over their own constituents. I employ original subnational data from Bosnia and Herzegovina on party organization and mayoral recalls from 2005 to 2015. The analysis shows that strong parties initiate recalls to install loyal, co-partisan mayors rather than to sanction mayors for poor policy performance. This pattern demonstrates a strategy by which central party organizations in competitive democracies stifle subnational democratization to consolidate power.

Communicative Governance to Mitigate the COVID-19 Pandemic

Emerging democracies are handicapped by systemic weaknesses such as inadequate healthcare safety nets, weak administrative capacities, and rigidly hierarchical bureaucracies and conflicts between levels of political leadership. The COVID-19 pandemic creates the urgent need for governments to overcome these structural limitations and facilitate responsive governance. This article uses the lens of communicative governance to describe how governments respond to the emerging health emergency and its challenges. It uses the case of the state of Delhi in India to analyze how the tools of government were operated to govern during an escalating health crisis. It documents the unique policy and administrative practices that are driving the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the global South. In doing so, it points to the ways in which urban e-planning can foster transformative capacities to support local communities.

Role Model or Role Expansion? Popular Perceptions of the Military in Tunisia

This article introduces a theory on military role expansion in emerging democracies and poses a broad question: who wants the military to adopt which role in society and politics? Drawing on an original, nationally representative survey conducted in Tunisia, the article explores people’s preferences for the military to remain a security provider or serve in government and contribute to policing protests. Findings reveal that public support for military role expansion is substantial and varies across political cleavages. We test hypotheses to account for cleavages driven by the country’s authoritarian past versus partisan divides during Tunisia’s transition to democracy. Findings indicate that popular support for military role expansion is driven by anti-system sentiments prevalent in contemporary Tunisian politics: while voters prefer the military as a role model for security provision, non-voters support its enhanced role in politics. These observations have ample implications for the research programs on civil–military relations and the dynamics of democratic consolidation. Tunisia’s experience warrants greater attention to anti-system attitudes caused by people’s disillusionment with democratic procedures. In turn, authoritarian legacies do not appear to play a prominent role during such challenging transitions toward democratic consolidation.

Options for Post-Election Conflict Resolution in Africa

Elections in most emerging democracies are generally characterised by irregularities which in turn fuel violent and non-violent expressions of displeasure before, during and after the voting excise. This paper discusses options for post-election conflict resolution with focus on African experiences since 2000. The paper holds that political and nonpolitical, local and international actors, play a dire role in ensuring that election-related insecurities are at least pacified. The paper assessed the constitutional, political and diplomatic alternatives to post- election conflict resolution. The paper goes further to examine the challenges that faced by African states in their exertion to deal with post-election conflicts. The study provides recommendations to inform the successes of the he post-election conflict resolutions in Africa. This paper establishes that most African states have lucrative legal frameworks on conducting elections and dealing with post-election unfortunate eventualities, the most compromise comes from, however, lack of political will and respect for the municipal ad international regulations. Furthermore, the paper realises that the continent, in some cases, lacks capacity and effectiveness on policy implementation to enforce electoral outcome or court rulings.

Election Violence and Voter Turnout in 2019 General Elections: What Role for Political Parties?

This study examines the incidence of electoral violence and its resultant effects on voter turnout in the 2019 general elections in Nigeria, with the role of political parties as the focal point of discussion. A review of election data shows; voter turnout has been on the decline from 69% in 2003 to 35% in 2019. While a handful of factors could be responsible, the study ascribes its prevalence to the antic’s political parties (incumbent and opposition) and politicians who deliberately deploy violence as an electoral strategy. To account for the relationship between, political parties, electoral violence and voter turn-out, the study builds on theories of voter mobilization in and advanced and emerging democracies. Against this, it concludes in the absence of enduring party-voter relations in Nigeria, political parties and politicians alike, resort to vote buying, mobilization of political thugs and in other times deployment of state coercive apparatus to intimidate opponents all of which culminates into electoral irregularities which has the potency to instigate electoral violence. This in turn has in amongst others adversely affected voter turn-out as rightly observed over five electoral cycles.