“An analysis of the effects of electoral systems on party competition which mainly focus on countries or eras where contextual effects are not pronounced or remain essentially constant and avoid settings where conditions are not conducive to political party formation, candidates and organizations are stifled and elections are mired in boycotts and violence. Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa are being examined which occur in environments that regularly qualify as extreme, in search of generalizations that shed light on the robustness of existing empirical results. This analysis relies on a new archive that was compiled of returns from more than 3600 district-level contests across 60 elections in 26 countries.”
