For Ethnic Group or Country? Evaluating Post-conflict Elections in Africa
The utility of post-conflict elections in sub-Saharan Africa has been the subject of lively academic and policy debates. While some scholars associate several electoral outcomes with votes for peace, others argue that post-conflict elections exacerbate existing cleavages and could reproduce the conditions that led to civil war if the right electoral system is not employed. This paper examines these contesting claims using electoral data in a comparative study of the first truly post-conflict elections in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The analysis shows that political leaders in both countries received votes across numerous cleavage lines in contradiction with an ethnic census.