Closely Fought Elections and the Institutionalization of Democracy

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 choice-however meaningful-is 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 fit 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 specific dynamics of intense but orchestrated competition in closely fought elections, and of the overriding need for a single authoritative procedure to corroborate results.