There is a complex set of political systems in Africa. While some countries democratized, particularly in the 1990s, others are run by authoritarian leaders. Some of the former have made efforts to strengthen their democracies whereas others have started to dismantle them. To understand these dynamics, this chapter scrutinizes the nature of the state, political orders, and democratization (attempts). It discusses the introduction of term limits (and their later abolishment) and strategies of leaders to stay in power: neopatrimonialism, violence and intimidation, electoral manipulation, as well as culture. There is a variety of actors operating in these systems besides the president, including the government, the public administration, parliamentarians, the military, judges, traditional leaders, and non-governmental organizations, all being discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 3 begins with a cross-national statistical test of the implication of the formal model. Designed to show the external validity of the model, the analysis explores the effect of different opposition and regime strategies on the likelihood of post-election protest. To illustrate that the information value of these signals varies according to the nature of the information environment, I analyze the outcomes in two types of non-democracy electoral regimes: electoral autocracies and closed autocracies. The results show that regime and opposition strategies do influence the potential for protest and that these effects vary according to the context in which elections are held. Given this finding, the second half of the book focuses on regime efforts to change that environment in the inter-election period, highlighting the propensity to manipulate the factors that alter popular perceptions about the regime its opposition, and the nature of state–society relations.

Chapter 8 returns to state and opposition contestation between national election cycles. It describes how the regime uses the advantages described in the formal model in Chapter 3 to respond to different electoral contexts, sometimes allowing the opposition to compete and banning them in other cases. In response, the opposition continues to innovate its strategies to generate new information about regime manipulation and the lack of electoral accountability. This process creates a perpetual campaign as the regime and opposition clash over elections at every level of the political system and between elections to shape information environments. The regime is forced to be nimble as it seeks to limit the diffusion of successful opposition strategies and avoid having to reveal new information in national elections. The focus on the Russian case describes regime success in 2016 and 2018 when it engineered victories without provoking protest. It also demonstrates that these efforts moved the regime incrementally in an autocratic direction, generating new political tensions and opposition opportunities. Victory did not end the potential for a breakthrough in the next election.