Liberia’s 2023 elections broadcast this West African country as a marvel. While previous post-war races set precedents for competitive elections – with no party winning a majority in the Legislature, victories of independents and candidates from smaller parties, and no clean presidential or legislative sweeps across any sub-political division – 2023 amplified these trends. Using detailed analysis of elections data and pre-elections interviews with presidential candidates, we coin the term ‘electoral exceptionalism as democratic consolidation’ to argue that Liberia’s combined high levels of competition, fragmentation and representation render it internally and sub-regionally exceptional in comparison to its democratic history and vis-à-vis countries in West Africa. Our decolonial exploration challenges assumptions in the mainstream literature about democratic consolidation, eschews the overuse of Western norms in comparing democracies, underscores the relevance of local and regional contexts, and justifies the adoption of ‘electoral exceptionalism as democratic consolidation’ to analyse African polities on their own terms.
Pailey et al. (Sun,) studied this question.