Elections are at the heart of representative democracy, a model that been presented as the ideal form of government, to be enacted across the globe. After the end of many one-party political systems in the 1990s, the number and frequency of elections across the world has steadily increased. However, over the past thirty years a crisis has been developing. The efficiency of “mature” democratic systems in the West appears to be weakened, while research about elections in Sub-Saharan Africa has shown that the advent of democracy has rarely been accompanied by improvements in the fairness and transparency of political processes. The absence of these conditions is undermining voting procedures and depriving them of their essential function: guaranteeing the accountability and the periodic renewal of political elites. Elections in most Sub-Saharan African countries remain imperfect imitations of Western democratic rituals.

The project « Re-examining Elections after African Experiences » associates quantitative and qualitative data collection about the voting processes with inquiries about how the actors involved experience the entire process through which leaders are chosen and accepted, from the designation of the candidates to the reactions following the results. The aim is to gather and provide useful data about the mechanisms of legitimation: how the citizens recognize of the leaders’ capacity to rule, and attribute them the right to govern. The outcome of the competition for political power depends on the perceptions and actions of a vast number of actors, not all of which are necessarily involved in the vote.

Researchers based in the targeted countries conduct the collection of data. They are organised in research teams supervised by locally based scholars. The teams are instructed as concerns the methodological framework and the use of EleQta to upload the data; team members are remunerated and provided with smartphones for data collection and upload. Team supervisors also meet every year to participate to a series of workshops and seminars where they present the results of the enquiries and collaborate to improve the methodological framework of the Project.