African regional organizations, such as the African Union (AU), East African Community (EAC), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have increasingly become involved in election affairs. The involvement ranges from fielding election observation missions to providing election assistance to arranging pre- and post-election mediation. The question is: do African regional organizations help or hinder democratization?During the 2000s, African regional organizations sought to deflect criticisms of election malpractice with the effect of legitimizing severely flawed elections. The result was a lost decade of election quality characterized by the reassertion and consolidation of authoritarian tactics. However, the rise of election competition in some countries and negative neighborhood externalities associated with flawed elections (including political violence, refugee crises, and regional economic instability) have spurred an evolution in the nature of African regional organizations interventions in the last ten years. For some regional organizations (e.g., ECOWAS), new approaches to election observation, provision of election assistance, and mediation have contributed to modest improvements in election quality in some instances. Yet, most regional organizations (e.g., EAC and SADC) have not developed significantly new approaches to election-related interventions. Even when there are modest improvements in regional-level election interventions, incumbent ruling parties have learned to live with an increase of scrutiny and sought new ways to undermine the regional oversight. This learning leads to adverse results for election quality.The dissertation argues that five factors influence the likelihood of African regional organizations intervening in elections: (1) their ability to gather and interpret actionable information about the quality of the election, mainly through election observation; (2) the support for and capacity of regional institutions to administer election assistance programs; (3) the embeddedness of regional organizations in networks of international institutions (such as the UN, donor countries, and international non-governmental organizations in the democracy and elections space); (4) the bal- ance and fairness of mediation and conflict resolution; and (5) the ability of opposition parties to develop relationships with regional neighbors and signal their credibility.The dissertation employs qualitative evidence from almost 300 total interviews conducted (2012-2017) at each of the regional organizations (AU, EAC, ECOWAS, and SADC) and in countries with disputed elections and some form of regional intervention (either to improve or not improve election quality): Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. The case study evidence is combined with a descriptive analysis using original data on election quality and the Perceptions of Election Integrity (PEI), with the entire dataset covering all sub-Saharan African country elections between 2000 and 2016. The empirical evidence suggests that a rare combination of the above-mentioned factors working together is required for an African regional organization to aid in improving election quality and leadership alternation. To date, this outcome has only been realized to the fullest extent in the ECOWAS region, specifically in Côte d’Ivoire (2010) and most recently in The Gambia (2016-2017). In contrast, despite some learning about how to deal with elections, the other African regional organizations have no or little influence over election quality and in some cases may make election quality worse. Moreover, regional organizations may reduce the probability of an alternation of leadership despite citizens’ demands for political change.
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