What are the issues facing international actors when they engage in post-conflict electoral assistance? What is the impact of international assistance on democratic politics in post-conflict situations? This paper from the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael) addresses the main aspects of elections and presents some of the recent lessons learned. The need for a sustainable approach is highlighted.
Elections are the main political mechanism for choosing governments and thus a central aspect of the process of democratisation. In post-conflict societies, competitive elections can serve not only the purpose of promoting democracy, but also of consolidating a fragile peace. International electoral assistance has become increasingly commonplace, and has taken a variety of forms. However, the results of elections in a range of post-conflict contexts are mixed. In some countries, elections clearly played a vital role in making a decisive break with the past. In others, flawed elections created more problems than they solved.
For international actors and post-conflict societies alike, electoral assistance forces critical political choices to be made. Lessons learned include:
- The timing of elections has been unfortunate in many cases; strong international pressure to hold elections as soon as possible has often been counterproductive.
- A bottom-up approach to electoral timing (starting with local elections, then national elections) is probably the best way to encourage the development of party politics and to inculcate voters in the routines of electoral politics.
- The appropriateness of specific electoral systems to particular political systems cannot be underestimated. These choices have a large and long-term impact on the process of democratisation.
- The issues of structure, independence and effective functioning of electoral management bodies to a large extent determine the success of the electoral process.
- The systems used by the international community for voter registration have proven to be too expensive and not very sustainable.
- Civic and voter education programmes are a key area of international assistance that can play an important role in instilling democratic practices in the population.
The priority for international actors should be helping to build appropriate and sustainable procedures and institutions that function effectively without external assistance. Specific recommendations are to:
- Strengthen the capacity of electoral management bodies.
- Develop and/or strengthen domestic election observer capacity (this is preferable to costly international monitoring).
- Support the building of broad-based programmatic political parties (this may help to avoid narrow, personalised and sectarian party systems that have often contributed to the outbreak of conflict).
- Provide appropriate support to first-time elections and then maintain support in subsequent elections.
