South Africa’s 2016 municipal elections were a watershed moment in the country’s ongoing democratic transition. They also amply illustrated the contradictory dynamics that characterize even the most promising young African democracy. On the one hand, the elections showed the underlying robustness of the country’s democratic institutions, as voters driven by dissatisfaction with the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) ability to provide services voted opposition parties into power, through free and fair means, in many of the country’s urban municipalities. On the other hand, dozens of candidates were murdered in different municipalities—murders that local commentators suggested were over access to spoils that election to a local council can bring. Stephanie M. Burchard’s Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa and Louis A. Picard and Thomas Mogale’s The Limits of Democratic Governance in South Africa each provide important insights on these contrasting dynamics. These dynamics also usefully illustrate areas where these books’ arguments could be refined or expanded in future work.

Burchard’s book comes at a timely moment in the study of violence in Africa. The civil war violence that dominated politics in many sub-Saharan countries during the 1980s and 1990s has largely ground down over the last two decades and political reconstruction of varying types has taken hold. This has not necessarily meant peace, however. Rather, waves of elections have brought waves of electoral violence—defined by Burchard as “any intimidating or harassing action that is directly related to the electoral process” (p. 12). More than half of African elections since 1990 by Burchard’s calculations involved such violence. Why?

To answer this question, Burchard disaggregates electoral violence into two broad categories: incidental and strategic violence. The former is an unplanned, expressive outburst of anger over electoral procedures or poll results where there is reason to suspect malfeasance. Strategic violence, by contrast, is pre-planned and deployed by elites to affect an electoral outcome, either by suppressing or increasing voter turnout. The institutional context shapes the kind of violence that is likely. Politicians in weakly institutionalized democracies, Burchard argues, will feel less constraint in turning party militias loose if they believe future sanctions are unlikely.

To make these arguments, Burchard uses a mixed-methods approach, relying on cross-national survey data and specific case studies. The case studies, which comprise the middle sections of the book, are well chosen, showing nice variation on the outcome being examined while holding institutional factors like the electoral system broadly similar. Chapter 3 examines a series of elections in Kenya where Burchard argues elites have repeatedly used violence strategically to drive electoral outcomes. Chapter 4 focuses on Senegal, a case whose violence following disputed elections in 2012 Burchard considers incidental to protests that surrounded the elections. Chapter 5 focuses on Liberia where, despite weak institutional capacity, there has been a relative absence of electoral violence.

Chapters based on cross national survey data bookend the cases. Chapter 2 relies on data from the African Electoral Violence Database to show how the institutional context—including electoral rules, political environment, and level of democratic consolidation—in which elections are held impacts the likelihood of violence. Chapter 6 asks how electoral violence affects voter turnout, finding that violence has differential effects on turnout depending upon partisan identities. Non-partisans stay away from the polls following violence while partisans turn out in greater numbers. Chapters 7 and 8 use AfroBarometer data to explore the effects of electoral violence on attitudes towards democracy. They come to a sobering conclusion: “[V]iolent elections, rather than advancing democracy, may actually undermine its development through the erosion of democratic satisfaction and democratic support” (p. 148).

The research design is one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as it nicely brings in Liberia as a “negative” case where violence would seem likely, avoiding a tendency in the political violence literature to sample only cases where violence occurred. Distinguishing among different types of electoral violence is similarly helpful as it enables Burchard to allow that not all electoral violence is necessarily caused by the same dynamics.

There is room, though, for continued refinement of the book’s arguments and places where the research agenda on electoral violence could be extended. Burchard samples primarily national-level elections for the case studies—a reasonable approach given the stakes and visibility of these elections. But, as the case of the South African assassinations alluded to above suggests, violence can occur during subnational elections too. Such elections may be worth future study as local politics is often the coalface of daily politics and patronage across the continent—something suggested by Picard and Mogale in the other book reviewed here. Relatedly, there may be room for continued refinement of the categories through which scholars understand political violence. Dividing electoral violence into strategic and incidental violence risks producing circular explanations, particularly in the case of strategic violence: if some forms of violence are strategic, then elites use violence because it serves strategic electoral ends. This challenge is enhanced because of the difficulty of accessing evidence of violent actors’ intentions, risking an analysis that infers actors’ intentions from the effects of their decisions. Lastly and relatedly, it would have been useful to have more data in the cases on why average people would participate in electoral violence, particularly with the elite-directed strategic violence in the Kenya case. Ultimately elites need individuals on the ground to carry out their orders. Why they would do so thus becomes an important question to consider. These questions though are directed primarily at refinement of a book that will make essential reading for scholars of an emerging research agenda.

Where Burchard primarily focuses on proximate causes to explain electoral violence, Picard and Mogale look at long-run legacies of South African state formation to explain the challenges the country has experienced decentralizing governance. In South Africa, municipal politics are the source of great intrigue as they have direct consequences for citizens because it is at the municipal level that most services are provided. However, in much literature on Africanist political science local-level politics are ignored in favor of national level questions—an unfortunate oversight as the story of state formation in Africa is often quite local. Indeed, one of the strengths of Picard and Mogale’s volume is to show that concern with the local was at the forefront of officials’ worries as far back as the earliest founding of the South African colonies when British colonizers invested great energy in establishing the indirect rule system to widen the reach of the state’s limited capacity. Another strength of the volume is to show how this pattern of state formation undermined local decision making capacity and increasingly directed resource allocation decisions to national-level institutions. There is a contradiction, in other words, in how the South African state has formed over time: it is at once deeply rooted in local-level politics yet decision making largely lies with national leaders, which has undermined the ability of citizens to participate in local politics even as they are deeply invested in its outcomes.

Much of the volume (Chapters 3–7) lays out the long-run history of this contemporary problem. Although additional signposts throughout the chapters drawing out the connections between this history and current politics would have been helpful, the chapters offer a comprehensive guide to the development of local government in South Africa. They show how parallel states were created under colonialism and later under apartheid—an urban state for whites and a rural state for blacks. The last four chapters (Chapters 8–11) show how this divide continues to structure local politics today. Some of the challenges are financial or technical; urban municipal governments, for instance, remain vastly better resourced and staffed than their rural counterparts. But, at base, the divide is a political one. At the time of transition, the democratic state’s control—and particularly the ANC’s control—was uneven at the municipal level. Over time the ANC changed laws concerning local governments, bringing them more fully under the control of the central state, even as they continued to operate as vehicles of patronage for local-level party operatives. In recent elections, rural governments have become increasingly central to the party’s electoral strategy. As the ANC lost vote share in urban municipalities, it was forced to reach out to chiefs who still held powerful symbolic and political control in rural areas. The effect, Picard and Mogale show, has been to cut local citizens out of participation in their own governance as party operatives increasingly dominate politics in urban areas and party-affiliated chiefs increasingly dominate politics in rural areas.

For Picard and Mogale these dynamics are caused by tensions between values that citizens hold and the institutions that governmental elites impose upon them. Policy making has been top down for so long in South Africa that there is consequently little room for local voices to guide allocation decisions and, as a consequence, the values that citizens hold are rarely reflected in their governing institutions—a pattern that donors unwittingly reinforce when then favor the central government in their grant making.

So what can be done? Picard and Mogale focus mainly on laying out the dilemmas of local level governance, though they imply that an expansion of local deliberation may provide citizens greater voice. However, another possibility presented itself at the country’s recent municipal elections: voting. Although the underlying nature of the country’s institutions are contradictory, part of that contradictory equation is a certain level of institutional stability and the country’s electoral system is among the continent’s most stable. As the recent elections showed, when citizens turnout to vote they can wrest some control from national-level decision makers and gain a greater say over local politics, even if that voice is ultimately filtered through one or another of the country’s opposition parties.