Since they were reintroduced all across the continent, back in the 1990s, elections in Africa have often been controversial affairs. Although they grabbed the attention of the media—as they do everywhere else in the world—in Africa, their perceived relevance was arguably augmented by the common idea of the exceptionally wide-ranging implications they supposedly have for a country’s freedom, stability, and development prospects. Yet, some observers have long criticized an allegedly obsessive focus on voting and voting outcomes and have deemed it a distraction from understanding more substantial and consequential, if less visible, political processes. Similar to what happened following “democratic” reforms across other regions in the world, a “fallacy of electoralism” was allegedly apparent. In Africa, in particular, this was seen as a tendency to concentrate too much on whether and when elections bring about turnover in elected rulers. The obsession is arguably due to the fact that the main rationale behind the continent’s transitions to multiparty politics was to overcome the postindependence inability to institutionalize peaceful and regular rotation in office at the top, with all the negative developmental consequences supposedly attached to this syndrome.

The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa is a critique of the fallacy argument itself. By pointing at “the fallacy of the fallacy” (p. 290), Nic Cheeseman, Gabrielle Lynch, and Justin Willis reaffirm the high relevance of electoral processes in African politics. But they do so by showing that such relevance goes well beyond casting votes, counting them, and assessing their consequences in terms of continuity or changes in the exercise of political power at the top. The authors argue that a full understanding of electoral processes and of their profound implications for African politics and society needs to consider how elections affect the “political subjectivities” of all those involved—not just voters but candidates and officials too—that is, “how individuals think about themselves and their relationship to the state” (p. 8).

Consequently, to the extent that the volume contributes to the study of democratic politics in Africa, it does so by trying to move beyond an established paradigm that mainly looks at formal and institutional developments and to address the role of—and interaction with—more informal processes and ideas. Yet, the book is not a study in democratic progress as such. It actually positions itself at the intersection of several strands of the Africanist and political science literature, most notably those dealing with identity politics, corruption, democratization (here, the theme of the authoritarian use of elections, which is well established in political science and mentioned in this work too, could have been addressed more squarely), state building, and nation building. It fruitfully draws on, and productively engages with, a wealth of existing works. The primary roots, however, are in studies of morality in African politics, including works by Peter Ekeh (although the authors insist on the need to correct his approach), John Lonsdale, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan. As is made clear by the title of the volume, the specific focus here is on voting-related dynamics. Yet, the key elements underlying the book’s analytical framework actually cut across African politics much more widely, if not tout court.

What the authors call the “moral economy of elections” refers to what elections mean to candidates, officials, and voters, which is deemed crucial for a full understanding of Africa’s election dynamics. What is the “language of virtue” (p. 18)—that is, what are the different norms—employed by individuals to make sense (interpret, justify, or criticize) their own behavior as well as the behavior of others around elections?

By identifying the main ideas of virtue that are deployed at the time of elections, the authors offer a relatively innovative and certainly helpful conceptual framework, even if they stop short of building a proper “theory” of elections in Africa. Such conceptual lenses build on the notion of different standards of morality that goes back to Ekeh’s seminal work on Africa’s “two publics” (Peter Ekeh, Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement, 1975) and that has been widely used by Africanist scholars, if not always under the same terminology. They do so by bringing together and re-elaborating the different ways such notions have been employed. Consequently, at the center is the inherent tension between two broad, ideal-typical “registers of virtue” (namely, the civic and the patrimonial) that feature prominently in shaping the moral claims made by the different actors involved in election processes (that is, voting officials, election observers, candidates, voters), with the very same individuals often adopting different and contradictory registers. On the one hand, civic virtue claim-making emphasizes impartiality, citizenship, and meritocracy. The polar stars, here, are all-embracing values of nation and stateness. Patrimonial claim-making, on the other hand, builds on more localized patron-client exchanges that revolve around notions of reciprocity, commonality, and preference. The two essentially pull in different directions, despite the authors struggling to claim that there is no zero-sum game.

The aforementioned analytical framework shapes the rich empirical chapters of the book, which are organized into two parts based on different sets of political actors that are examined. The first part focuses on election management bodies, electoral observers, and civil society organizations. The second part digs into the way politicians and voters experience elections. All told, three countries are examined closely (Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda), with only occasional references to other African cases that would have fit well into the analysis. For each of the three core cases, fieldwork was conducted in three distinct internal areas, all selected in such a way as to ensure a reasonably wide representation of a country’s socioeconomic and political diversity. This qualitative research was complemented by the use of national surveys conducted as part of the project, as well as some laboratory games. The result is a wealth of empirical material (even if at times it is somewhat repetitive) deconstructing how political subjectivities are shaped differently in Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya. This is ultimately described as due to a broad set of factors that are identified as the key drivers differentiating outcomes in the three case studies—notably, socioeconomic context, institutions, historical precedents, and individual agency. A country’s own trajectory, and the way actors privilege claims linked to opposite “virtues”—the civic and the patrimonial—is in turn bound to affect prospects for the evolution of electoral politics in each of the three countries.

Through both theoretical and empirical work, The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa lays out valuable new lenses that can help the efforts of researchers, analysts, and observers to more fully understand not just the complexities of electoral processes but, more broadly, some of the key political dynamics taking place across the African continent.