THE LIMITS OF ELECTORAL COMPETITION: HOW POLITICAL OPENINGS CAN FUEL PATRONAGE AND INSTABILITY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA - A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SIERRA LEONE, GHANA, AND KENYA

Joseph M. Conteh, Aminata Kera Conteh

Abstract


This article examines a foundational paradox in the political science of democratization: electoral competition, long treated as a corrective to corruption and authoritarianism, frequently produces the opposite of its intended effects. In contexts of weak party institutionalization, fragile state capacity, and entrenched neo-patrimonial logics, political openings expand rather than constrain patronage networks, swell cabinets beyond efficient size, weaken bureaucratic insulation, and elevate the risk of post-electoral instability. Synthesizing Driscoll's (2018) account of bottom-up activist pressure, Arriola's (2009) quadratic theory of cabinet expansion and coup hazard, and the party institutionalization scholarship of Riedl (2014) and Lauren Morris MacLean, the article argues that the destabilizing potential of electoral competition is conditional on institutional complementarities that classical democratization theory tends to assume rather than examine. Using a most-similar-systems comparison of Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Kenya, the article traces how three Anglophone African polities with broadly comparable colonial inheritances, multiparty constitutions, and ethnically plural electorates have generated sharply divergent outcomes. Ghana stabilized through institutionalized alternation between the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party; Kenya managed periodic violence through constitutional engineering after 2010; Sierra Leone has experienced cabinet hyperinflation, eroding trust in the National Electoral Commission, and recurring electoral crises in 2018 and 2023. Drawing on Afrobarometer surveys, World Bank governance indicators, and qualitative process tracing, the article identifies four mechanisms linking competition to instability: activist-driven patronage expansion, coalition-management cabinet bloat, ethnicized vote-buying under volatility, and the persistent gap between de jure democratic procedure and de facto neo-patrimonial power. The article concludes that democratization assistance focused narrowly on election quality misreads the institutional preconditions of consolidation.

Keywords


electoral competition, patronage politics, neo-patrimonialism, cabinet expansion, party institutionalization, instability, Sub-Saharan Africa democratization

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejpss.v9i2.2225

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