The Digital Platform for Electoral Anthropology.
What is EleQta?

EleQta is an IT platform ensuring the safe and rapid upload of information about electoral processes studied within the Re-examining Elections After African Experiences research project.

Research data produced within the project is uploaded via a web interface accessible through the research team members’ smartphones; the data includes quantitative elements as well as text, images, videos and sound. EleQta also ensures the standardisation of the data collected according to an established methodological framework, as well as its coherence that are guaranteed through a series of cross-validation processes. The scope of EleQta is to make electoral data available to and exploitable by researchers worldwide, by allowing them to conduct comparative research while filtering the data through a number of geographical, chronological and thematic criteria.

What is the Re-examining Elections after African Experiences research project?

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.

Our Progress

2016 Research Campaigns
  • Congo-Brazzaville 100% 100%
  • Ivory Coast 100% 100%
2017 Research Campaigns
  • Congo-Brazzaville 100% 100%
  • Democratic Republic of Congo 100% 100%
  • Kenya 100% 100%
2018 Research Campaigns
  • Cameroon 100% 100%
  • Democratic Republic of Congo 100% 100%
  • Gabon 100% 100%
  • Madagascar 100% 100%
  • Swaziland 100% 100%
  • Togo 100% 100%
  • Zimbabwe 100% 100%
2019 Research Campaigns
  • Senegal 100% 100%
  • South Africa 100% 100%
2020 Research Campaigns
  • Cameroon 100% 100%
  • Ivory Coast 100% 100%
  • Togo 100% 100%
2021 Research Campaigns
  • Congo-Brazzaville 100% 100%
2022 Research Campaigns
  • Angola 100% 100%
  • Kenya 100% 100%
2023 Research Campaigns
  • Gabon 100% 100%
  • Madagascar 100% 100%
  • Democratic Republic of Congo 100% 100%
  • Zimbabwe 100% 100%
2024 Research Campaigns
  • Senegal 80% 80%
  • South Africa 80% 80%

Countries

Members

Field Missions

Dossiers about Political Actors

Data Entries

News and Publications

E. Mandikwaza – Dialogues for Sustainable Peacebuilding

This article discusses the complexities of political dialogues, focusing on the reasons behind their failures and strategies for successful dialogue outcomes, using Zimbabwe‟s political landscape as a case study. The study‟s primary objective is to shed light on the...

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Insights on the 2016 Congolese presidential election

Insights on the 2016 Congolese presidential election

EleQta or the Reexamination of Elections Starting from the Practice in Africa: the Case of the Presidential Election in Congo-Brazzaville in 2016 Article by Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga and Pietro di Serego, published on Africana Studia n. 31 (2019). This article presents...

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African Elections as a Mirror of the World

African Elections as a Mirror of the World

The purpose of this Workshop is to defend the idea that African situations provide insights into the electoral event around the world. Indeed, since the 1990s, the end of single-party regimes has produced a sharp increase in the number of elections on the...

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Bibliography

The Teams

Supervisors

Researchers

How does EleQta work?

Partners