Today in Africa, besides religion, democracy and its concomitant catchphrases – governance and good governance – dominates political life as the panacea to all social ills. One of such buzz word is election – the bride of honour of liberal democracy. It has assumed the status of a ritual where, every four or five years people run around to participate in an ‘event’ (or festival) as though they are undergoing a cleansing process that automatically secure their wellbeing for the years ahead. Democracy, political participation, and election have been the subject of rigorous intellectual discourse in recent times. However, whilst providing significant insights on the importance of election to democratic consolidation, missing/absent in the broader literature on democracy is analysis of the complexities making election an invaluable component of the democratic tradition, that is, election as a series of interrelated processes. Combining secondary data obtained ‘before’, during, and after the 2015 General Election in Nigeria as well as semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the power of institution in the (un)making of electoral democracy, and offer an alternative understanding of election as a process-in- practice as opposed to ‘process’ in theory. Using systems theory, this paper argues election as a composite whole whose character and outcome cannot be dissociated from the interdependent and interrelated processes that make up the whole.
Today in Africa, besides religion, democracy and its concomitant catchphrases – governance and good governance – dominates political life as the panacea to all social ills. One of such buzz word is election – the bride of honour of liberal democracy. It has assumed the status of a ritual where, every four or five years people run around to participate in an ‘event’ (or festival) as though they are undergoing a cleansing process that automatically secure their wellbeing for the years ahead. Democracy, political participation, and election have been the subject of rigorous intellectual discourse in recent times. However, whilst providing significant insights on the importance of election to democratic consolidation, missing/absent in the broader literature on democracy is analysis of the complexities making election an invaluable component of the democratic tradition, that is, election as a series of interrelated processes. Combining secondary data obtained ‘before’, during, and after the 2015 General Election in Nigeria as well as semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the power of institution in the (un)making of electoral democracy, and offer an alternative understanding of election as a process-in- practice as opposed to ‘process’ in theory. Using systems theory, this paper argues election as a composite whole whose character and outcome cannot be dissociated from the interdependent and interrelated processes that make up the whole.