Performative Democracy?
Summary
Recently, political candidate Yoweri Museveni won the Ugandan election. This is his seventh term in which he won more than 70 per cent of the vote. And while the presence of suffrage suggests that Uganda follows democratic norms, a closer look demonstrates otherwise. A democracy is expected to allow opposition parties to participate in free and fair elections. The citizens will then have full autonomy to decide who can best govern the country. In Uganda, pro-democracy activists called for biometric voter ID machines to be used in the elections. This helps to prevent voter fraud and rigging. However, many of these machines were said to have malfunctioned. Electoral officials resorted to manual voter registration, which allowed 'massive ballot stuffing', where fake or extra ballots were illegally added to the vote count to inflate a candidate’s results. It is not surprising to us that Museveni won the election. Uganda is rated 'not free' by the rights monitor Freedom House; it noted that while the country holds regular elections, they are not considered credible.
Application
Such a case study demonstrates that political analysis should consider HOW democratic a country is by assessing whether its democratic features are substantive. It compels us to look beyond the surface and put countries on a spectrum that measures the extent of democracy they observe and protect.