As Africans enter busy political year, scepticism marks weakening support for elections

The past decade has seen a multitude of challenges to democratic norms in the pursuit of power, from incumbents manipulating constitutions to stay in power, repression of legitimate campaign activities, and pre- and post-election violence to electoral fraud and coups d’etat. [...] Efforts by the political class and electoral bodies to shore up public confidence in elections often involve complex and costly control systems, such as electronic voting in Nigeria, that have pushed the per-capita cost of African elections to more than double the global average without ensuring elections that are widely seen as legitimate (Sawyer, 2022). [...] In contrast, the strongest faith in this function of elections is expressed in Copyright ©Afrobarometer 2024 3 Ghana (80%), which has witnessed multiple changes in both head of state and ruling party, and the Gambia (72%), where 22 years of dictatorship ended with electoral defeat and exile for Yahya Jammeh (Al Jazeera, 2017). [...] Regional coordination of national partners in about 35 countries is provided by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in South Africa, and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. [...] Institute of Peace, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the Open Society Foundations - Africa, Luminate, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the European Union Commission, the World Bank Group, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Uganda, the.