This comprehensive volume brings together a diverse set of scholars to analyse candidate nomination, intra-party democracy, and election violence in Africa. Through a combination of comparative studies and country-specific case studies spanning much of Sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa, the authors shed light on violence during candidate nomination processes within political parties. The book covers several cases that vary significantly in terms of democracy, party dominance and competitiveness, and the institutionalization and inclusiveness of candidate selection processes.
The authors investigate how common violence is during candidate nomination processes; whether the drivers of nomination violence are identical to those of general election violence; whether nomination violence can be avoided in high risk cases such as dominant party regimes with fierce intra-party competition for power; and which subnational locations are most likely to experience nomination violence.
Through its focus on violence in nomination processes, this book firmly places the role of political parties at the centre of the analysis of African election violence. While adding to our theoretical and empirical understanding of nomination violence, the book contributes to the literature on conflict, the literature on democratization and democratic consolidation, and the literature on African political parties.
This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Democratization.
Merete Bech Seeberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and affiliated with the CODE project on conflict and democratization. Her research centres on authoritarian elections, electoral manipulation and violence, and democratization. She is the author of State Capacity, Economic Control, and Authoritarian Elections.
Michael Wahman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University, USA. He specializes in democratization and elections in new democracies, particularly on the African continent. His earlier work is published in a wide range of journals including Comparative Politics, Democratization, Electoral Studies, Journal of Peace Research, and Party Politics.
Svend-Erik Skaaning is Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark, and co-principal investigator of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. His research interests include the conceptualization, measurement, and explanation of democracy and the rule of law. He has published numerous books and articles on these issues.
