IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/afrdev/v26y2014i4p610-630.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Determinants of Election Outcomes: New Evidence from Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Kjell Hausken
  • Mthuli Ncube

Abstract

type="main" xml:lang="en"> Any election may result in six possible situations. The incumbent or challenger may win according to the official results. If the incumbent wins, he may remain in power, or a standoff or coalition may ensue. In contrast, if the challenger wins, he may become the new incumbent, or a standoff or coalition may ensue. Using a database of all presidential and legislative elections in Africa over the period 1960–2010, we found the following distribution of election outcomes: the incumbent wins with no contestation 63.9 per cent, coalition 6.4 per cent, and standoff 1.2 per cent. The incumbent loses and accepts defeat 15.9 per cent, coalition 12.3 per cent, and standoff 0.3 per cent. We have then tested empirically 22 hypotheses on the determinants of election outcomes in Africa using a discrete-choice multinomial logit model. We study the impact of the shape of the economy, the provision of public goods, education, social diversity, number of years in power of the incumbent, whether the incumbent is a military official or not, the strength of the opposition, natural resource endowment, colonial origins of the country, and whether the election is presidential or legislative.

Suggested Citation

  • Kjell Hausken & Mthuli Ncube, 2014. "Determinants of Election Outcomes: New Evidence from Africa," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 26(4), pages 610-630, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:afrdev:v:26:y:2014:i:4:p:610-630
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Olayemi M. Olabiyi, 2020. "Electoral participation and household food insecurity in sub‐Saharan Africa," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 32(3), pages 392-403, September.
    2. Tugba Zeydanli, 2017. "Elections and Subjective Living Conditions in Sub†Saharan Africa," African Development Review, African Development Bank, vol. 29(4), pages 545-561, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:afrdev:v:26:y:2014:i:4:p:610-630. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/afdbgci.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.