Paper long abstract:

In December 1953 Sukumar Sen, an Indian civil servant, bid farewell to Sudan, after ten months as Chairman of the Electoral Commission which had just overseen Sudan's 'self-government' election. 'Your election', he told the people of Sudan in a radio broadcast, 'can legitimately claim to have been a model of its kind'. Sen was something of an authority in the new field of end-of-colonialism elections, having organized the Republic of India's first election in 1949, but he was not alone in the idea that Sudan's polls might be a model. As polling began in November 1953, the Sudan Government - with the permission of Sen's multi-national Electoral Commission - had released a photographic book on the election, intended to 'arouse the interest and sympathy of all democratic people' by showing the polls as an example. Purporting to show the whole electoral process, from the defining of constituencies, through the casting of ballots to the final announcement of the victor's name by a uniformed Returning Officer, the book casually blurred representation and reality, offering staged photographs with the assurance that 'they faithfully represent the scenes which are talking place during the elections'.

For some, at least, the ability to stage this process in itself asserted - to an international audience - Sudan's readiness to join the international community. As Sen, again, had put it at the start of the election, this was for the people of Sudan 'a rare opportunity of demonstrating to the entire world that they possess political maturity and the qualities that go to make a nation great and progressive, namely: tolerance, discipline, integrity and a sense of civic duty'. But what form should this model take? The election saw determined attempts at manipulation - by Sudanese and by Sudan's rival colonial masters, Egypt and Britain. Much of this manipulation revolved around the mechanics of the election, and there were bitter arguments within the Electoral Commission which belied the bland good cheer of the picture book. The Egyptians believed that direct voting would favour their supporters; the British thought that indirect voting would serve their interests, and as a result the ballot was a curious mixture of systems - direct and indirect, and with voting 'by acclamation' and by token as well as by ballot.

Yet all involved were driven by a concern over representation - over how the election would look, to outsiders and to those involved. Was it to be a demonstration of incipient nationhood, as Sen suggested, or a evidence (as one British official privately observed) of the 'farce of self-government elections [for] peoples who consider themselves as belonging to a tribe and not to a nation'? And behind the disputes over details of process, all involved in planning the election shared a concern with the election as an exercise in governmental ordering: this was a performance which was aimed also at a participant audience - the Sudanese people, for whom the election was an experience of being listed, ordered, and marshalled, as much as one of exercising choice. In the aftermath of the election, British officials consoled themselves on the disappointing (for them) result by reaffirming this aspect of the ballot: 'it's a comfort', remarked one, 'to see the Sudanese still retaining their stolid placidity and respect for law and order'.

This paper will examine the visions of election offered by the photographic book as an exploration of late-colonial ideas of what elections should be, and will also note the significant elisions effected by this pictorial record, which foregrounded the educated and rendered invisible those whom the electoral process tended to exclude. It will suggest that, for those who organized it, the election was concerned not so much with representation of the will of the people, but rather with the representation of process.

Paper long abstract:

Elections are the central institution of liberal democracy, translating the idea of democracy into practice. They are essentially about choosing a set of elites for political leadership. Yet the process of elections is in itself a key event, legitimizing the authority of those who will govern. Elections must be seen as free and fair, in order for those elected to rule with legitimate authority. Therefore, elections always contain both an element of spectacle and element of democracy. It is the relative weight of the two elements that is important. A way of getting at that relative weight is to ask on what basis do people vote, how do they choose among elites contesting for office?

Since 1992 Ghanaian elections have increasingly been conducted in a free and fair manner, culminating in a near perfect performance in 2004. Using the case of Ghana, this paper asks the following questions:

(1) To what extent are elections in Ghana spectacles, performed to produce the legitimacy of the government and the ruling elite and empty of meaningful political choice?

(2) To what extent are elections institutions through which people choose political elites to represent their interests and through which they try to hold their leaders accountable for their actions?

(3) To what extent do elections serve some other purpose?

The first part of the paper assesses what the secondary literature tells us about the historical basis of electoral choice in Ghana, particularly through studies of local politics and elections. The second part of the paper draws on primary research carried out by the author during the November 2004 national elections in Ghana. Focusing on one electoral constituency in the Northern Region, it considers the electoral process as spectacle and as democracy (concentrating on the why people vote the way they do). The third part of the paper draws out change and continuity in past and present electoral experiences. It concludes by offering answers to the questions posed above.

Paper long abstract:

The recent presidential and parliamentary elections in Uganda, like most post-independence elections which have preceded it, were conducted in a storm of controversy, tension and disputed levels of legitimacy. They constituted only the third set of multiparty elections in Uganda's history, the first being in 1962 immediately before independence, and the second in 1980, which precipitated a five-year long civil war. There was no shortage of evidence indicating a variety of rigging systems, electoral fraud and intimidation on a substantial scale. Despite this, the election results have been upheld by foreign governments, some observers and the national judiciary, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as legally binding. This apparent contradiction lies at the heart of what this paper sets out to explore, begging the question of what elections in Uganda actually represent. It is argued that the very conduct of a multiparty election is viewed as being a sufficient criterion in itself for rendering legitimacy to the political process, provided that two key political boundaries have not been violated. The first is that of domestic unease. A government may be unpopular, indulge in electoral malpractices and yet still not have stirred up a sufficient mass of domestic dissent to precipitate physical rebellion. The second refers to the positive state of an incumbent's relations with foreign governments and institutions. Neither of these boundaries had been crossed at the time of the February elections.

Given this, we are prompted to ask what precisely it is about elections that afford political legitimacy to a victorious incumbent. We might assume that the answer lies with electoral structures and procedures with which we are all familiar - polling stations, an electoral commission, an electoral register, voter cards, counting procedures and suchlike. All of these criteria however, were violated to greater or lesser degrees in the recent elections. Such violations were overshadowed by maintaining the integrity of our two boundaries which preclude domestic and foreign protest and political action on any significant level.

But this stark political reality cannot comprise in itself the substance of electoral discourse. The breach is rather filled by contentions and apologies associated with liberal notions of political evolution, reformism and democratisation. In the recent February elections these took the notional form of democracy-through-multipartyism. Until July 2005 Museveni had presided over a 'no-party' system which was a one-party state in all but name. Increasing domestic and foreign unease at his continued authoritarianism prompted him to hold a referendum (which resulted in a pro-multiparty vote) and the subsequent February multiparty elections, in an attempt to forestall domestic instability and donor sanctions. In the recent elections then, the key legitimising factor which has served to undercut increasing domestic and foreign unease was the holding of multiparty elections for the first time in 26 years. The very act of engaging in a process of multiparty elections conferred a degree of political legitimacy that transcended the illegitimacies arising from multiple manifestations of electoral fraud and the numerous historical injustices that have occurred under his tenure. This has served to make it more difficult for elements of the opposition to resort to more familiar means of removing an intransigent incumbent. It has also pandered to Western liberal notions of multiparty elections as being a first step towards 'procedural' democracy, which is, we are told, itself a precursor towards 'substantive' democracy.