Identifying the Institutional Effects of Mixed Systems in New Democracies: The Case of Lesotho

Abstract

This paper addresses the effects of the mixed system used for the last three elections in Lesotho (2002Lesotho ( , 2007Lesotho ( and 2012), a small African country with a turbulent history regarding opposition acceptance of elections. The decision to implement a mixed system was in part to encourage democratic stability, yet whether the electoral system has become more conducive to democratic competition is unclear. Through an analysis of national and district-level results, this paper addresses the following questions. First, at the district level, is competition consistent with Duverger's law or the contamination thesis and is a progression over time evident? Second, does the population size of a district influence the number of candidates and the concentration of votes? Finally, following recent research on detecting electoral fraud, this paper tackles whether the reports of district results suggest extra-institutional manipulation.

Lesotho’s 2015 Legislative Election: Providing or Undermining Stability?

“…Table 2 presents an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression on the vote concentration among the top two candidates with the number of district candidates as the sole independent variable. Using the data from Rich et al (2014) and supplemented with 2015 we see that the raw number of district candidates negatively correlates with vote concentration across all three models; however, only in 2015 does it fail to reach statistical significance at all. In other words, it appears that the influence of the also-rans has declined markedly since even 2012.…”

“…0s and 5s), although any number outside of two standard deviations from the mean would be cause for alarm. Rich et al (2014) use a similar method and find no systematic evidence of fraud in Lesotho's 2012 election. We replicate these findings for 2015 with separate tests of the reported number of registered voters, total voters, and the number of votes rejected (Table 3).…”

“…The shift marked the country's first free and fair election in 2002, despite protests by the opposition (Makoa, 2004), and the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) providing marginal means for domestic groups or international observers to challenge election results (Makoa, 2004). Nevertheless, institutional reforms appeared to signal the beginning of democratic consolidation, reflected in the elections of 2007 and 2012 (Rich et al, 2014); the latter seen as the best political climate since democratization efforts in the early 1990s (Letsie, 2013).…”

The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa

“…In 2002, multi-party competition and democratic stability seemed to have emerged in Lesotho after the new electoral system had been instigated (Rich et al 2013), and Mosisili led the Lesotho Congress for Democracy (LCD) to a substantial and peaceful victory (Rosenberg and Weisfelder 2013;Weisfelder 2015). Finally, Lesotho thus found itself politically stable and free of postelection conflicts-the opposition parties had been given some representation and visibility, but failed to attain a strong opposition towards the dominant LCD.…”

The 2016 Electoral Reform in Mongolia: From Mixed System and Multiparty Competition to FPTP and One-Party Dominance

“…This article tests the effects of FPTP in the Mongolian elections of 2016 by analysing national- and district-level results. Especially, we address the question whether the electoral competition at district level was consistent with Duverger’s law (two-party competition) and resulted in restoration of bipolar party politics, which were disrupted in 2012 due to the use of MMM together with the previous split of the post-communists, or whether some elements of multiparty competition that resulted from the outcomes of the 2012 elections due to contamination across the components of the mixed system (so-called contamination thesis, see Herron and Nishikawa, 2001; Rich et al, 2014), also prevailed at the district level in 2016. Due to the frequent electoral engineering, Mongolia could serve as a very useful case for testing hypotheses related to Duverger’s law in the context of a transforming party system, especially as a large part of the literature on electoral systems is based on research in Western Europe and other older democracies, with limited insight into institutional reforms in younger democracies (Rich et al, 2014: 649).…”