On travelling to Nairobi after a month and half in Uganda, I was soon struck by how many Kenyans automatically assumed that their neighbour’s elections had been rigged. More worrying still is the number of people who have voiced their sceptics about elections in general.

In short, a common feeling (in both Kenya and Uganda) is that it was obvious that President Yoweri Museveni was going to win, since incumbent presidents in Africa are loathe to hand over power, and that elections are a waste of time and money.

This level of electoral scepticism is clearly worrying, as it helps to undermine the legitimacy of elected leaders. It also increases popular frustration and a sense of anger or apathy – neither of which are healthy for the evolution of democratic systems.

This particular kind of scepticism also focuses attention almost entirely on the final stage of an election — on the voting, counting, tallying and announcements — to the relative neglect of the (un)evenness of the playing field and nature of political campaigns. However, it is in this broader context that many problems lie.

In Ethiopia and Rwanda, for example, incumbents win elections with relative ease, not because they steal them, but because there is little space available for any political opposition to function. Clearly, Uganda is more open, and Kenya more open still, but the playing fields in both countries are still far from even.

In large part, this imbalance is due to the ability of incumbents to use the powers and resources under their control to their own advantage.

Such benefits of incumbency were evident in Uganda’s recent elections, as the ruling National Resistance Movement spent unprecedented amounts of money on their campaigns — from T-shirts and posters to mobilisers, public address systems and direct handouts. The campaigns were also marred by intimidation of opposition politicians and activists including the repeated arrest of the principal opposition candidate, Kizza Besigye, in the final days of the election.

In addition, ordinary people were promised further handouts and projects if their areas voted NRM, and threatened with economic marginalisation and the possibility of insecurity and violence if they voted for the opposition.

Similar tactics have been used across much of the region. However, while the use of money and repression are the subject of frequent comment, less discussed is the increasing use made by governments of the spectre of insecurity.

Delegitimise opposition

In short, a common idea is that incumbents have helped to bring peace and stability, and that political change threatens the same. In turn, citizens are called upon to unite behind their governments in the interests of stability and development, and to refrain from rhetoric and action that could foster division and disunity. In this context, opposition becomes framed as not only anti-government, but also as dangerous and unpatriotic.

Such politics was central to the 2013 election campaigns in Kenya during which Jubilee emphasised the need to support an alliance that brought together the previously warring Kalenjin and Kikuyu communities, and thus minimise the likelihood of election-related violence.

In the aftermath of those elections, the terrorist threat has been similarly used to insist on the importance of unity and to delegitimise opposition.

In the Ugandan context, NRM argues that it is President Museveni who brought peace and stability to Uganda and that, without him, the country will slip back into the war and instability that marred previous decades.

Similarly, in Rwanda, Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Susan Thomson — two academics based in North America —have shown how, “In the face of their country’s ‘saviours’ and rebuilders, Rwandans [post-genocide] are expected to fall in line, to accept the new Rwanda, and actively take part in the changes.”

In Ethiopia, Amnesty International has highlighted how the country’s “revolutionary democracy” constitutes a more extreme version of this form of governance, as citizens are depicted as being either with or against the government with dissenters frequently imprisoned on “terrorism” charges.

On closer inspection, such politics is far from new. Instead, there are clear similarities between the arguments made by such leaders for unity today, and those made by the authoritarian nationalist leaders of the 1960s to early 1990s.

Guided democracy

In the days of Africa’s one-party states and military regimes, such politics led the political scientist Richard Sklar to coin the term “guided democracy” as a “type of government by guardians of the public weal who insist upon political uniformity.” At the time, Mr Sklar associated guided democracy with rulers who accepted that they should be accountable to their subjects, but who dispensed “with the political method of multiparty electoral competition.”

He also presented it as a form of “developmental dictatorship” where an insistence on unity and the suppression of political opposition was justified by the assumed need to prioritise socio-economic development.

Recent years have seen the emergence of new “guided democracies” namely, regimes that accept the need for multiparty elections, but in which the playing fields are firmly skewed in favour of incumbents.

In these new “democracies,” the need for political uniformity behind elected leaders is once again justified in the interests of peace and stability and by fear of violence and insecurity. More specifically, the trend is for establishment politicians to employ histories and memories of local, national and global violence in an effort to present citizens with a stark choice between violence, chaos and economic collapse or peace, stability and economic development.

Such realities of campaign activities and messaging do not mean that electoral malpractice in the classic sense is not often a threat or reality.

On the contrary, it simply means that, in addition to monitoring the freeness and fairness of voting, counting, and tallying processes, much more attention needs to be given to election campaigns.

By further expanding the gaze of election observers and analysts in this way, a range of critical questions emerge.

How much money is being spent, by whom and on what? Are opposition activists and politicians free to mobilise support and to criticise the government? Is there a free and independent press, and sufficient space for a vibrant civil society?

What is the role of a country's security forces, judiciary and other key institutions? What promises and threats are made to ordinary citizens? Do the campaigns place them in a situation where they are able to choose between leaders on the basis of election manifestos, or are their choices unduly influenced by short-term handouts or threats of economic marginalisation, insecurity and chaos?

These questions are critical as it is in this complex interaction of factors that the very possibility of a change of power through the ballot box, which should lie at the very heart of a modern democracy, is found.

This is critical since, at the moment, transfers of power only tend to occur when incumbents stand down. This raises questions about second term elections, but even more serious questions about the fairness of elections in countries — such as Uganda — that lack presidential term limits.

Gabrielle Lynch is associate professor of comparative politics at the University of Warwick, UK ([email protected]; @GabrielleLynch6)