Paper Topic:

Voter Particpation and Electoral Competition

ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION

LITERATURE REVIEW

The famous dictators of the world today apparently claim to have gained power by being democratically voted in office . The list of these famous dictators includes the likes of Robert Mugabe and his Ethiopian counterpart Meles Zenawi of Africa and Parves Musharaff of Pakistan . In the just concluded elections , the Herald news of Zimbabwe records that the whole world expected a political milestone in the politics of Zimbabwe . The Herald (Saturday March 29th ) continues to report that with a political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe , with the

country being rated as the country with the highest inflation rate (100 ,000 , then it is expected that the people of Zimbabwe will make a meaningful decision to vote out Mugabe and bring in a person well respected by the international community , to foster again the economic growth of Zimbabwe . After the 29th the whole world was shocked at the number of Zimbabweans who voted for Mugabe

The same transpired in Kenya where the whole had given on any hope that the incumbent president Mwai Kibaki would ever go back to state house In the election that was conducted on the 27th of December last year according to the daily nation (Daily Nation , 30 December 2007 , it was against the expectation of many a people that the incumbent came to win the elections . Infact , according to the Daily nation news of February 28th , it is this unexpected turn of events that led to chaos that gripped the Eastern Africa state . In the months that followed serious chaos ensued that led to the formation of Grand Coalition Government on the March 28 , 2007 after the chaos left 1500 people dead and about 350 ,000 displaced . In one of his writings , Steven Blair , a political science lecturer at a Johannesburg University has written and said that in Africa an incumbent never loses (Blair , 1979 . This is the reason former President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya , Jerry Rowlings of Ghana and even the communist Fidel Castro have never known defeat in their lifetime in the political carrier , even though they are very much unpopular among the people

Our main concern in all these is the relationship with the electorate of that country and also the millions behind the electoral campaign to popularize even the formerly unpopular candidates . First of all let us look at some data provided from Kenya by the daily nation news (Daily Nation Thursday April , 24 2008 . I t records in a revelation sort of that the main political parties that participated in the elections of that country used a lot of cash worth billions of shillings , the currency of that country . The political party (Party of National Unity ) used by the incumbent presidential candidate , president Mwai Kibaki led in the list , using Kshs 2 .1 billions 33 ,870 , 968 The Orange Democratic Party , ODM , led by the opposition leader Mr . Raila Odinga , was the second in the list using almost Kshs1 .2 billions 19 354 839 ) while the...

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