Taiwan Journal of Democracy, Volume 2, No.

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Closely Fought Elections and the Institutionalization of Democracy

Laurence Whitehead

Abstract
This article looks at how closely fought elections today and historically have provided unique opportunities to advance the institutionalization of democracy, as political and social actors accept outcomes determined by laws, formal procedures, and established institutions. The author then looks at such democratic contests as promoters and controllers of the expression of partisan loyalties on the part of the electorate, such that politics, instead of being the continuation of war by other means, has be converted into a perpetual democratic peace, in which each choicehowever meaningfulis only another episode in a meta-process of nonchoice (a collective commitment not to bid for power outside the electoral framework). A review of various old democracy experiences shows how this culture of acceptance of formally corroborated results is arduously constructed over time and how multiple and overlapping legal, social, domestic, external, local, and national sources of reinforcement come into play. A wide array of social and political actors must suppress differences and unite around the legitimacy and probity of the results. This reversal of stance can be hard to achieve even in the most stable and irreproachable of old democracies. It demands an exceptional degree of discipline, unity, and public spiritedness in new democracies, where the passions raised by a closely fought campaign may be harder to control. A consensual outcome, therefore, can never be taken for granted and requires constant vigilance and renewal by successive generations; making exceptions for some parties or groups will call into question the integrity of the entire electoral process. The author argues that, barring some obviously disastrous formulae, there is no single right formula to produce such a consensus on outcome, as each outcome must t with the distinctive history and political understandings of each society. The author discusses possible explanations for why there are more closely fought elections than one might expect from a normal distribution of cases, and concludes with a consideration of the specic dynamics of intense but orchestrated competition in closely fought elections, and of the overriding need for a single authoritative procedure to corroborate results.

Laurence Whitehead is an Ofcial Fellow in Politics at Nufeld College, University of Oxford. <laurence.whitehead@nufeld.oxford.ac.uk>

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This special issue of the Taiwan Journal of Democracy is devoted to closely fought elections and what they reveal about the institutionalization of democratic rules of the game. Not all democratic elections are closely fought, but a surprisingly high proportion is. Not all closely fought elections attract intense voter involvement, and not all involve choices that are highly consequential for the society as a whole, but again the recent experiences highlighted in this collection indicate the remarkable frequency of such contests. It mattered for Spain whether the Aznar administration would be endorsed or rejected in 2004. The American presidential election of 2000; the Indian parliamentary election of 2004; the Italian parliamentary election of 2006; the Costa Rican presidential election of 2006these were all closely fought, each outcome was a cliff-hanger, and the results had far-reaching implications for the future course of democratic politics in these countries. The same was true of the Puerto Rican gubernational election of 2004, and the Peruvian presidential election of 2006. The presidential recall vote in Venezuela in 2004 may not have been so closely fought as the other instances considered here (the evidence on that is still disputed in some quarters) but it, too, was highly contentious and its outcome was also very consequential for the future of democracy in that republic. Finally, at the point when this issue goes to press, the same has proved the case in the Mexican presidential and congressional elections of July 2, 2006, with less than one percent of the valid vote separating the two front-runners for the presidencyresults are not yet formally conrmed. (It was in anticipation of just such a possibility that Mexicos Federal Electoral Institute [IFE] and the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judicial Power [REPJF] jointly sponsored an international seminar on closely fought elections in Mexico City in March 2006, and thereby gave rise to this special issue.) All these recent electoral contests (both in old democracies and in new ones) concentrated the collective political energies of these societies. Their voters were called upon to make decisions of real importance, not just about the alternation in ofce of one or another set of professional politicians, but also about major issues of public policy, and perhaps even of collective identity. Voters responded not just as individual consumers (for whom the individually rational act might have been to stay home and free ride on the misplaced commitment of other voters) but as politically engaged citizens. No doubt democratic political engagement also requires involvement in other forms of public life, and not just during the fteen seconds every few years needed to cast a valid vote. However, these contests indicate that electoral participation (and indeed partisanship) remains a powerful driver of democratic politics in many countries. They also indicate how often the dynamics of an election campaign can crystallize a signicant split in public opinion that divides the electorate fairly equally, and that therefore offers a genuine opportunity for meaningful collective choice. Finally, most (though not all) of the closely fought elections under examination here produce not

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only divisions and choices, but also subsequent collective agreement to abide by the outcome. They can legitimize contentious decisions. The international seminar at the IFE paid particular attention to the lessons that could be drawn from these comparative experiences, with regard to the institutionalization of democracy. This topic is obviously of great practical significance for those charged with ensuring the smooth conduct of free, fair, and contentious elections. It is also an understudied area in the comparative politics of democratization, as an academic endeavor.

Democracies Old and New: Institutionalization and Consolidation

Although the cases considered here all refer to elections held between 2000 and 2006, it is essential to place these recent experiences in context. Such practices have emerged from several centuries of experimentation and adaptation aimed at developing a self-institutionalized system of representative democracy. The institutionalization of representative government has a long and checkered history. The advocates of parliamentary rule and (qualied) manhood suffrage in the English Revolution had to win a civil war and execute a king who claimed to rule by divine right, and even then they were unable to consolidate parliamentary supremacy, let alone protect civil rights or promote toleration. It required a monarchical restoration, a succession crisis, and a foreign invasion before the English began to live under a mixed constitutional regime under which monarchy, aristocracy, and elected parliament could overcome outright frontal confrontation and learn to live together under a rule of law framework. And another two centuries had to elapse before the House of Commons achieved full supremacy on the basis of fair and democratic elections. The political history of French democracy is similarly protracted. Here, too, the claims of hereditary ascendancy had to be cut short by state violence (in the form of the guillotine), and here, too, the victorious and ostensibly representative National Assembly proved unable to impose its new order, or avoid foreign invasions and monarchical restoration, let alone protect civil rights or promote toleration. Impersonal government under a constitutional framework was not achieved until the 1870s. The democracy of neither the United Kingdom nor France is fully consolidated. Even today, the United Kingdom has some further tasks of democratic consolidation to complete before it can fully achieve the procedural minimum standards set by Dahlian democratic theory, let alone the more elaborated criteria for consolidation specied by Linz and Stepan. And in France, a century (and five republican constitutions) later, the specications of Dahl and Linz were still incompletely satised. Indeed, even today, anti-system parties such as the National Front challenge French democracy from within, while street protests constrain the constitutional process from without. Likewise, in the case of the United States, which has the worlds oldest and most authoritative constitutional order, established

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by the thirteen colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America in 1789, it would be an error to read into the origins of the system a determinative degree of institutional consolidation ab initio. It is true that a farsighted Bill of Rights was enacted (in amendments of the original constitution) as early as 1791, but large-scale African slavery persisted for another seventy years, and was only abolished after a hugely fratricidal civil war. Another century had to elapse before the descendents of those noncitizens achieved formal equality of political rights and, even today, African-Americans, Native Americas, Puerto Ricans (and some others) are subject to various forms of unequal treatment that are difcult to accommodate within the framework of modern democratic theory. Countries that have undergone much more recent rapid progress toward the institutionalization of both representative and, indeed, democratic systems of government obviously display greater vulnerabilities and a greater degree of incompleteness. However, one of the most notable elements of the case studies presented here is that they illustrate remarkable advances toward Dahlian (if not yet fully Linzian) standards of democratic performance. As a comparativist, my interest is to search for regularities and transferable lessons from parallel experiences, rather than either to dwell in great detail on the inwardness of any single process, or to elaborate at the local level of abstract theory specications of democratic performance that have never been fully consolidated anywhere. Comparative politics requires the construction of theoretical models (either deductive oras in the caseinductive generalizations derived from really existing democratic experiences). Such generalized constructs can then be presented as templates against which specic national experiences and conjunctures can be judged.

Closely Fought Elections and the Institutionalization of Conict

This issue of the Journal reviews a succession of recent and prospective election contests in competitive electoral regimes, both new and old, with the dual objective of highlighting a crucial aspect of democratization that has received insufficient attention in the comparative literature, and of deriving practical lessons from that exercise that could (in principle) help electoral authorities to avoid unnecessary pitfalls in the immediate aftermath of closely fought contests for national ofce. One aspect of democratization that requires more attention (and more comparative modeling ) than it has received so far is the two-phase process through which a democratic contest both promotes and controls the expression of partisan loyalties on the part of the electorate. On the one hand, as the preordained date for a national election draws near, the citizenry may find themselves drawn into an unusually intense period of partisan confrontation and politicization. On the other hand, these partisan passions are controlled as to both form and rhythm by the structure of the electoral process. Once the

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count begins, this temporarily reinforced partisanship is abruptly replaced by equally intense collective disciplines aimed at uniting around a legitimate outcome applicable equally to winners and losers alike. This sequence is far from self-evident. Societies where the population is not yet accustomed to a perpetual sequence of authoritative and competitive elections have to internalize this strange and counter-intuitive logic. Politics, instead of being the continuation of war by other means, has to be converted into a perpetual democratic peace, in which each choicehowever meaningfulis only another episode in a meta-process of nonchoice (i.e., a collective commitment not to bid for power outside the electoral framework). Adam Przeworski has become famous for labeling this the institutionalization of uncertainty, but one might with equal justice highlight the reverse characteristicall actors have to learn the certainty of institutionalization. The various cases under examination in this Journal should suffice to demonstrate how far from automatic such a learning process is, above all in new democracies where the stakes of each political confrontation are high, and where partisan interests have been long socialized into a winner takes all logic of struggle. In order to avoid any suggestion that analysts from old democracies are viewing their more recent counterparts as inferior, it is worth recalling the United States presidential election of 1800, as recently reevaluated in the excellent volume by John Ferling, Adams versus Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (Oxford University Press, 2004). The analysis provides a most illuminating backdrop to the intensely contested presidential election of 2000, which is the subject of the paper by George Edwards. So intense was the partisanship of 1800 that both sides truly feared for the future of their nation if the other prevailed. The Sedition Act of 1798 put freedom of expression at risk, although in the end this outcome of the election was to enshrine a more ambitious version of the doctrine of free speech than had hitherto been envisaged, even in the United States, while the Supreme Court also derived much of its exceptional balancing power from the need to reconcile the defeated Adams faction to the prospect of living under a supposedly Jacobin Jeffersonian administration. In a similar vein, the shock outcome of the British general election of 1945 had to be accepted by the defeated Conservative Party in compensation for its excessive success in the Khaki election of 1918 (returning soldiers voted for domestic change rather than victorious imperial continuity). Even the Gaullists had to swallow and accept when the greatest critic of their presidential-dominant Fifth Republic, Franois Mitterrand, himself won the presidency (and proceeded to internalize the logic of the rules he had so long and bitterly condemned). From these old democracy experiences, we can distil some inductive inferences that may help us to model the hotly contested electoral competitions under review in this Journal. The first is that it can take a remarkably long time, even in very longstanding and well-regarded democracies, before all signicant contenders

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for power come to accept that the verdict of a fair electoral competition is the only game in town for determining the circulation of ofcial ofceholders (let alone being the sole vehicle of a societys broader collective political choices). The second is that, over successive electoral cycles, rival power groups can benefit from the bitter experience of accepting defeat in one contest if they come to see their interests as also including the opportunity to live on to fight again another dayto strengthen their entitlement to their fruits of a future victory by conceding those fruits this time to their victorious competitor. However, this is not a consolation that will have equal appeal to all power contenders and it may require considerable domestic socialization and international reinforcement before it can be fully embraced by all. The third is that, under favorable conditions (which need to be carefully specified), a hotly contested election that inflames partisan passions may actually precipitate intensified efforts at institutionalization strong enough to reinforce the inclinations of all parties to work within the agreed rules from then onward. This is a realistic possibility, but by no means a necessary response to approaching an abyss of partisan conflict. Good institutional design and appropriate foresight can boost the chances of this outcome, but they are far from sufcient to guarantee it. Consequently, the fourth implication is that institutional stability and continuity should never be taken for granted. They require constant vigilance and renewal and have to be relearned by successive generationsnot only by political leaders, but also by opinion formers, the ofcials of state institutions, the media, academics, and international observers. Once exceptions start to be made (e.g., excluding Islamists, or ex-communists, or nationalists, and so on, despite their conformity with electoral requirements) the integrity of the entire electoral process is brought into question. Fifth, to keep the show on the road requires multiple and overlapping sources of reinforcementlegal and societal, domestic and external, local and national. There is no single source of enforcement that can substitute for a collective sense of responsibility for tolerance, openness, and fair play. How closely fought is closely fought? The answer is partly, but not entirely, statistical. In a system where the voters and the political leaders deposit very strong condence in the electoral authorities, even a numerically very close outcome may be fairly noncontentious. In Costa Rica in 2006, for example, the winner eventually emerged ahead by only 18,169 votes (1.1 percent of those cast). This was far more readily accepted than the official result of the Venezuela recall election of 2004 (an 18 percent margin in favor of the incumbent President Chavez, although his opponents continued to claim an 18 percent margin against him). The 2004 parliamentary elections in India reinforce the Costa Rica example. Here, the difference between winning and losing alliances was only 0.6 percent of the valid votes cast. The hugely complex voting process was spread over five weeks. The result was

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unexpected (even contradicting the last of the exit polls). Yet there was no questioning of the outcome in India. The counting was swift, and the powerful independent Electoral Commission scored a 79 percent rating in a recent trust in institutions survey. The commission is neutral, but only by convention. However, over the past fifteen years, it has gone to great lengths to demonstrate its neutrality and to convey its message to the media.1 The 2006 parliamentary elections in Italy also won public approval, despite protests of fraud from outgoing premier Berlusconi (which embarrassed some of his own allies) and the fact that the two rival alliances were so close in votes that they only barely avoided a split outcome (the left secured a majority in the lower house, but almost missed it in the senate). Yet if some very narrow results can nevertheless be accepted as legitimate, others can prove highly destabilizing. In the Taiwanese election of 2004, the gap between winner and loser was only 0.22 percent of the valid vote, and this election outcome led to inammatory street protests. The Central Election Committee was made a target of public ridicule, and two years later, the losers seem irreconcilable to their defeat, preferring to attempt to impeach the sitting president and/or to vote down his prime minister. In Puerto Rico, the very narrow losers of the gubernational vote of 2004 were in no way satised with their offsetting strong victories in the upper and lower houses of the islands congress. Having first challenge the gubernational vote through the mainland U.S. courts (eventually losing because the islands Supreme Court was recognized as authoritative), they then tried to use their control of the Puerto Rican congress to bring down (or blockade) the elected administration. Here, too, the bitter aftermath of a closely fought election is continuing institutional deadlock and political polarization. It may be that these two island stories are exceptional, because in each case the vote revolved as much around issues of international legal status as around the alternation of parties in government. But the presidential election of 2000 in the United States also left a residue of bitterness and polarization, since the Supreme Court was called upon to determine an outcome not settled by the electoral process. In this case, even though the winner of the presidency was the loser of the popular count, the unifying authority of the Constitution of the United States was enough to institutionalize as democratic an outcome that almost any other Western democracy would have considered illegitimate. However, there is not doubt that the election was perceived as closely fought and brought really existing electoral democracy in the United States down from its pedestal. A second process of the same kind at some point in the future might well prove more damaging. This Journal issue considers only elections for top level authorities presidents, prime ministers, and members of national assemblies. Even so,
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This passage summarizes the evidence on the Indian case presented to the IFE seminar by Yogendra Yadav. His conclusion was that public support was more critical than legal powers for an electoral institution.

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the range of institutional possibilities is quite wide. The election can be for a single body (the parliament) out of which a government will be constituted by the winning party or coalition of parties. Or, there can be separate elections for the congressional and executive branches. If there are separate elections, these can be coterminous or (as in the Dominican Republic, for example) staggered. In Mexico, the president is elected for six years, the lower house for three, and the senate for six, but although there are crucial national elections for all three positions once every six years, there are also staggered senatorial elections and the complete renewal of the lower house at mid-term. Presidential elections can be for one term, for a maximum of terms, for one term followed by a break, with a second reelection then allowed, or they can be without term limits. Presidential elections can be decided by a bare majority of the popular vote, or by an electoral college, or can be settled on a second round if no candidate receives 50 percent on the first round (in Costa Rica the threshold is set at 40 percent). The second round could be settled by congress rather than by the electorate (as in Bolivia). There are various threshold rules (for example, for the receipt of public funding to finance the election campaign, for registration as a political party allowed to present candidates, for formation of coalitions between legally constituted parties, and so forth). There are also many alternative formulae for the election of parliaments and congresses, notably single-member, rst-past-the-post elections, proportional representation with closed party lists, or with open lists, among others. There are also recall mechanisms, such as the provision in Venezuela that the president can be required to face a mid-term reelection if the electorate so decides in a properly constituted national recall vote. Parliaments may have xed terms, or presidents/prime ministers may, under certain conditions, be empowered to dissolve parliament and call fresh elections at dates of their choosing. There are also various methods for validating an election outcome. Complaints about electoral irregularities can be resolved by a congress, or by a regular court of law, or by a special electoral court. The electoral process can be organized by a government ministry, or by an independent agency, or by local authorities. External observers may sometimes play a determinant role; more often, they lend support to local efforts at institutionalization, but in some major cases (such as India and the United States) they are insignicant. These are the key variables on any comparative matrix. Comparative institutional politics proposes various hypotheses which are better or worse in their generation of legitimate and effective outcomes. My general view is that there is no single right formula. Most alternatives have pros and cons that have to be traded off or adjusted to the distinctive history and political understandings of each society. However, there are a few disastrous formulae that clearly should be avoided. My favorite is the Brazilian procedure whereby the president and the vice president were each elected by a separate popular vote, so that, in 1960, the conservative president

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found himself serving jointly with a leftist vice president. That led to twenty years of military rule. More generally, the kind of comparative exercise conducted here can help election organizers in each country reflect on the other possibilities and their associated benets and trade offs. We can all hope to learn from each other without implying that any one country has all the answers.

Why So Many Closely Fought Elections?

Not all competitive elections for national office are closely fought, but it is worth considering why a surprising number are. Under previous authoritarian conditions, most contestants in elections were not accustomed to the idea of a fair count, and the consequent need to calibrate a campaign for a possible close contest. They were most likely to expect that democratic contenders would be defeated by fair means or foul, unless they could mobilize overwhelming support. The consequence seems to be that, in current democratic elections, rival contenders may be inclined to overmobilize their supporters and to raise partisan expectations too high. If a particular contender is ahead, his or her party may become overconfident, even fearful of the pressures from its supporters, and may therefore divert its energies into preparing for government, rather than focusing on the campaign. The rival contenders who are behind may, by contrast, use every device that they can think of to catch up. (This is only a heuristic model, not a precise analysis of any particular case, since, of course, each closely fought election has its own distinctive features.) This understanding could suggest why there are more closely fought elections than one would expect from a normal distribution of casesmore cases where, in the last stages of the campaign, the gap is narrowed between the front runners (who could have peaked too soon and could alienate the voters due to their overcondence) and the laggards (who can come up from behind because they are so focused on the electoral contest itself). In other words, even when one particular candidate or party starts out with an apparently impregnable lead, it is not uncommon for the opposition to rally around the most viable alternative, or for the front-runner to peak too soon. So, the dynamic of the election campaign can often generate a greater degree of uncertainty about the outcome and more widespread popular interest in the race than might have been predicted on the basis of the routine political interactions that occupy contenders for power during the much longer periods of other activity between electoral campaigns. Various explanations can be suggested: as a campaign advances, the rival parties may increasingly identify and converge upon the preferences of the median voter; there may be momentum or bandwagon effects that boost the morale and attractiveness of a late challenger; the front-runner may be so preoccupied with the problems of governing after an anticipated victory that insufficient effort is focused on securing that essential result; there may be reservoirs of apathetic or

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disenchanted voters who have no interest in ratifying the complacency of the status quo candidate, but who can be drawn into the electoral process if they believe their participation will bring about change or will humble powerful incumbents. Different combinations of these factors probably operate in each case, but taken together they may increase the probability of a closely fought outcome even when the initial distribution of preferences points to a foregone conclusion. Specic Dynamics In the course of a closely fought election campaign, the level of political partisanship in the society can be expected to reach a peak, with the potential for increased partisanship among militants and intensied politicization and polarization among the electorate at large. Most closely fought campaigns excite both hopes and fears concerning the consequences of victory or defeat. Various practices and mechanisms can be established both to arouse interest in the outcome and to channel these energies into structured (typically nonviolent) directions. Mass rallies, television debates, door-to-door campaigning, workplace sindicato, or church-based advice and direction all tend, on the one hand, to intensify public interest in the contest, and, on the other, to direct attention to the specic actions required of the concerned voter (as well as to the forms of partisan behavior that are either prohibited or to be discouraged). So, although political conflict may reach a crescendo during a democratic election campaign, it is also carefully orchestrated. There is a clearly specied time and place for approved activism, and many other potentially dangerous manifestations of political militancy are simultaneously discouraged. The parties have the task of arousing partisanship, and the electoral institutions have the task of containing and moderating it. A successful election is one in which these two conicting logics are appropriately managed and balanced. Consensus on Outcome If the parties or their partisan allies were left free to announce the results as the count proceeded, there would be an evident danger that each side would inate the hopes and expectations of its supporters, and would fail to persuade its opponents to accept an adverse outcome. Therefore, great care is needed to generate a single authoritative procedure for reporting (and, if need be, corroborating) the ow of results. The outgoing administration may be called upon to play a difficult role, here (particularly if the victorious candidates are from the opposition). The media also carry a heavy responsibility, since they probably will have attracted extra viewers, readers, and advertising revenue by dramatizing the issues at stake in the contest. In general, a wide array of social and political actors will be required to put aside the differences that were highlighted during the campaign and to unite around a consensual message concerning the legitimacy and probity of the results. This reversal of stance can be hard to achieve even in the most stable and irreproachable of

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old democracies. It demands an exceptional degree of discipline, unity, and public spiritedness in new democracies, where the passions raised by a closely fought campaign may be harder to control. Various sources of reinforcement can assist in the forging of this consensusthe legal system; the academic community; international observers; the signals sent by major foreign governments, and so on. As Mexico approached the critical presidential and congressional elections of July 2006, all of these possibilities were to some extent in evidence. Three factors specific to the Mexican case heightened concern: (1) there would be no second round of voting, so a presidential candidate with a bare plurality (possibly less than 33 percent of the votes cast) could capture the executive ofce for the next six years; (2) the separation of powers between the executive and the legislative branches of government, and within the federal system, was still somewhat undened, so competing parties would be tempted to view the outcome of the next election as system-defining, as well as alternation-controlling; and (3) about a decade ago, Mexico had experienced a longstanding history of disputed outcomes and days of electoral fraud as well as distrust in official vote declarations, which was eventually overcome by the far-reaching and expensive institutional reforms of 1996. As this issue goes to press, the IFE and the REPJF are facing their biggest challenge yet. The gap between the two front-runners in the presidential contest may have proved too close to permit an immediate announcement of the winner. The rival contenders and their followers will have to await the validation of the final count. In almost two centuries of electoral politics, Mexico has never known such a close and consequential contest, with the loser willing quietly to accept the verdict of the state authorities. The 2006 election will provide a fundamental test of the strength of Mexicos new democratic institutionalism. In the last analysis, it will be for the Mexican electorate to decide whether the electoral process was conducted correctly, and to support or oppose their leaders accordingly. Thus, the election not only will test the strength and objectivity of state institutions, but also the political maturity of the Mexican people.

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