Loughborough University
Browse
piccolino_2015_democratization_accepted.pdf (171.69 kB)

Infrastructural state capacity for democratization? Voter registration and identification in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana compared

Download (171.69 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2016-10-06, 12:58 authored by Giulia PiccolinoGiulia Piccolino
© 2015 Taylor & Francis.A large portion of electoral irregularities in developing countries stem from administrative deficiencies, rather than deliberate fraud. This is particularly evident when it comes to voter registration and identification: the quality of a voter list depends on the existence of effective mechanisms to register and identify citizens and electors, which might not be easily at hand in many developing countries. Democratization in these countries has been accompanied by intense polemics about the quality of the voter rolls and the identification of electors, which have threatened democratic consolidation. Biometric technology has been recently heralded as a possible solution, but its effective potential is disputable. In order to understand how problems with registering and identifying voters have affected democratization, this article reviews the contrasting experiences of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. In Côte d'Ivoire, the problem of the reliability of the voter register has been entangled since the 1990s with the politicization of the citizenship question. As a consequence, compiling an acceptable voter register has proven extremely difficult and cumbersome. In Ghana, an effective electoral administration has been key to overcoming the mistrust of the political parties about the fairness of the voter process.

History

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

Democratization

Volume

23

Issue

3

Pages

498 - 519

Citation

PICCOLINO, G., 2016. Infrastructural state capacity for democratization? Voter registration and identification in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana compared. Democratization, 23(3), pp. 498-519.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-10-31

Publication date

2015-02-23

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Democratization on 23rd Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2014.983906

ISSN

1351-0347

eISSN

1743-890X

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC