Reframing US politics through African lenses: a cross-continental dialogue on electoral systems and political thought

1 Introduction

Consider two voters casting ballots for the US presidency. A resident of Wyoming participates in a contest in which each electoral vote corresponds to roughly 193,000 people. A resident of California participates in the same contest in which each corresponds to roughly 722,000—a ratio exceeding three to one, determined entirely by geography. No other mature democracy selects its head of government through an equivalent mechanism. The American founders themselves regarded the Electoral College as a pragmatic compromise rather than an ideal expression of democratic equality, and serious reform efforts have repeatedly collapsed under the weight of institutional self-interest rather than constitutional necessity.

Now contrast that with events in Dakar on 24 March 2024. Bassirou Diomaye Faye, released from detention only ten days before polling day, won Senegal’s presidential election outright with 54 percent of the first-round vote. The sitting president, Macky Sall, had sought to postpone the election by executive decree. The Constitutional Council rejected that decree within seventy-two hours. Sall complied. A peaceful transfer of power followed within weeks. The outcome unfolded without an Electoral College, without gerrymandered legislative districts, and without a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that deferred legal accountability until after the election had concluded.

Scholarly commentary on these two cases tends to diverge markedly in tone and analytical generosity. Over-representation of smaller American states is typically treated as an imperfect but entrenched constitutional feature. Senegal’s successful election is more commonly framed as a fragile ‘African democratic bright spot’—a noteworthy exception that demands cautious qualification by reference to the country’s prior record of incumbency manipulation and press restriction. American institutional shortcomings are catalogued as familiar blemishes on an established order. African democratic gains are classified as anomalies requiring circumspect explanation. This article disputes that persistent double standard and the asymmetric epistemological architecture it reflects.

1.1 American democratic strengths, stated at the outset

Before proceeding further, the strengths of the American constitutional order deserve to be named plainly rather than reserved for a closing qualification. Two and a half centuries of unbroken constitutional government—surviving civil war, presidential assassinations, economic catastrophe, and, most recently, a serious attempt to prevent a democratic transfer of power—represent a form of institutional continuity that takes generations to accumulate and moments of catastrophic failure to destroy. The sixty-two post-election court cases brought after the 2020 election, sixty-one of which were dismissed or decided against the challengers, were not a vindication of the Electoral College or of partisan redistricting; they were a vindication of an independent judiciary that had accumulated enough institutional credibility to resist overwhelming political pressure. Genuine flows of democratic learning also run from the United States toward Africa, and this article does not suppress them. Strong-form constitutional judicial review—the principle that courts may invalidate legislation and executive action on rights grounds—has influenced South African, Kenyan, and Ghanaian constitutional design, and the influence has been productive. The independent regulatory agency model provides institutional templates for the African independent commissions this article cites as comparative resources.

Naming these strengths at the outset is not a rhetorical concession designed to inoculate the argument against the charge of imbalance. It is a substantive claim about what kind of contribution the article makes. The point of what follows is not that American democracy is fragile relative to its African counterparts in some aggregate sense—the evidence marshalled throughout, including the comparative data in Section Four, does not support that claim. The point is that a constitutional order with a deep and largely successful democratic history can still carry specific structural pathologies that lenses developed elsewhere are better positioned to diagnose than the lenses that order has developed for itself. Acknowledging American strength and diagnosing American pathology are not in tension; the second claim only has force because the first is true.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni has characterised the underlying issue as the coloniality of knowledge—the structural survival of colonial-era hierarchies through which certain intellectual traditions retain the authority to evaluate and prescribe, while others are positioned primarily as objects of study or cautionary baselines. In comparative democratic theory, this pattern has meant that African political thought and governance experience are seldom invited to serve as analytical instruments for diagnosing problems in long-established Western democracies. The present study deliberately inverts that direction.

Two preliminary qualifications frame the entire analysis. First, the argument rests on no claim of African democratic superiority in aggregate. The available comparative evidence does not support such a claim, and none is advanced here. Rather, the article maintains that selected African philosophical traditions and specific institutional practices can illuminate particular weaknesses in American electoral arrangements with a clarity that more conventional lenses have not matched. Second, the article confronts directly the legitimate objections that such a reversal invites—concerns about transferability across radically different contexts, the risks of selective case-selection, and the danger of simply inverting one epistemic hierarchy to produce another. These concerns are addressed in Section Three and again in the final section on objections and limits.

The remainder proceeds as follows. Section Two develops the theoretical framework and a methodology through decolonial approaches to international relations, comparative electoral-systems research, Ubuntu philosophy as normative-analytical resource, and a direct examination of the epistemic status of the perception-based indicators used later in the article. Section Three explains briefly how the 2024 electoral cases function as illustrations within that framework rather than as a test of causal propositions. Section Four applies the theoretical lenses to four structural features of the US electoral order, drawing on comparative data from the Electoral Integrity Project. Section Five examines African political philosophy and constitutional innovations as constructive democratic resources. Section Six brings evidence from the 2024 electoral cycle to illustrate the article’s core claims. Section Seven addresses the main objections and limits, including the transferability problem and the fragility of African democratic performance outside the cases selected here. Section Eight concludes with the implications for comparative political theory.

2 Theoretical framework

2.1 Decoloniality and the problem of epistemic hierarchy

The vocabulary that dominates comparative electoral studies—democratic consolidation, backsliding, hybrid regimes, democratic deficits—took shape principally in scholarship on Southern Europe and Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. These frameworks were then exported, largely intact, to virtually every context in which competitive elections subsequently appeared. Africa thereby became a principal testing ground for analytical tools it had no part in developing. Mignolo and Quijano characterise this pattern as the coloniality of power: the persistent intertwining of knowledge production with colonial hierarchies long after the formal dissolution of empires. From this perspective, the claimed universality of Eurocentric political theory is not chiefly the product of superior reasoning but a historical inheritance sustained through entrenched institutional practice—academic hiring, editorial gatekeeping, curriculum design—rather than through argument alone.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni illustrates how this dynamic operates in African international-relations scholarship: researchers employing rigorous empirical methods frequently find their analyses funnelled through frameworks that portray Africa as perpetually lagging behind externally defined standards, while scholars based in the United States or Europe face no equivalent expectation to interpret their own cases through African-derived categories. This asymmetry is structural, not merely attitudinal; it cannot be overcome by declarations of even-handedness alone.

Mamdani’s examination of the colonial state adds a structural dimension to this epistemological critique. His account of what he terms decentralised despotism describes how colonial administrations governed through a bifurcated legal order: urban, predominantly assimilated populations were incorporated as rights-bearing civil subjects under imported legal codes, while the rural majority was administered as ethnic subjects through a customary authority frequently reshaped by the colonial state itself for purposes of control rather than genuine tradition. The distinction was not incidental; it was the mechanism through which colonial rule reconciled minimal metropolitan legal commitments with maximal extraction and control. Applied reflexively to the United States, this framework surfaces a notable parallel with racialised voter suppression: poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses rest on a logic of differentiated citizenship that Mamdani traced in the colonial context—one legal status for those presumed to belong to the political community without qualification, a second, contingent status for those whose civic standing had to be continually demonstrated or withheld—a logic persisting today through felon disenfranchisement and targeted polling-place reductions concentrated in specific jurisdictions and demographics.

Santos proposes a response through what he calls an ecology of knowledges, developed against what he terms abyssal thinking: the epistemological line that divides valid knowledge from what does not even register as a candidate for truth or falsehood. Where abyssal thinking operates, entire traditions of thought are not merely disagreed with but rendered invisible as sources of theory- a process Santos and others have called epistemicide. An ecology of knowledges is a refusal to limit scholarly rigour exclusively to the epistemic norms of any one tradition, and a corresponding insistence that traditions on the far side of the abyssal line be engaged as sources of general theory rather than as regional data about particular cultures. Treating African political philosophy with the analytical seriousness ordinarily accorded to Locke, Rawls, or Habermas is not a lapse into relativism; it is a precondition for genuinely open comparative inquiry, and it is the precondition this article attempts to satisfy in the sections that follow.

2.2 Comparative electoral systems and the transitology critique

Lijphart’s distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracies remains the most productive organising framework for the questions this article pursues. Consensus democracies characterised by proportional representation, coalition governments, and multiple veto points consistently outperform majoritarian systems on voter turnout, women’s parliamentary representation, social policy generosity, and environmental outcomes across a wide range of cross-national datasets. The United States is a textbook majoritarian case: single-member plurality districts, winner-take-all presidential selection, two-party dominance. The implications follow directly from Lijphart’s comparative evidence.

Norris’s Perceptions of Electoral Integrity index shifts focus from design to administration, measuring what actually happens in elections rather than what constitutions promise—a distinction that matters because performance and design diverge substantially in practice. Carothers identified transitology’s central flaw: its assumption of a linear progression from authoritarianism to democratic consolidation permanently situated Western democracies at the terminus and foreclosed analysis of democratic erosion in established systems. Levitsky and Way showed how competitive authoritarianism—the hollowing out of formally democratic institutions through legal manipulation and partisan capture—operated in post-Soviet states and Latin America. That the tools developed to analyse emerging democracies now illuminate features of the world’s oldest constitutional republic is itself a methodological finding with implications for how the field organises its comparative reference points.

2.3 Methodology

A methodological symmetry must be maintained here that the comparative literature on this topic does not always observe. The African constitutional provisions discussed below should not be assessed only by their textual design and stated normative commitments while the American position is assessed only by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment in Citizens United and McCutcheon—an interpretation that is a matter of constitutional implementation rather than of original design intent. The First Amendment’s text says nothing about campaign expenditure; treating political money as protected speech was itself a contested interpretive choice, not a design feature the framers debated and adopted, and several of the Court’s own precedents prior to Citizens United upheld expenditure limits. The doctrinal foreclosure of campaign finance regulation is therefore a product of a particular line of judicial interpretation, not an inevitable implication of American constitutional design.

Fairness requires applying the same implementation-level scrutiny to the African cases. Rwanda’s electoral law and Botswana’s electoral financing regulations exist against a backdrop of comparatively weak disclosure infrastructure and, in Rwanda’s case, a dominant-party system in which formal financial equality coexists with severe restrictions on opposition organising more generally. Mauritius’s Representation of the People Act provisions offer the strongest implementation record of the three, but even there enforcement capacity is modest relative to the sums involved in more contested cycles. The comparison that survives this more symmetrical treatment is narrower than a design-versus-implementation contrast would suggest: it is not that African constitutional design is normatively superior and American practice inferior, but that the American case is unusual in having foreclosed the very possibility of expenditure regulation at the level of doctrine—a foreclosure none of the African cases cited has made, even where their implementation remains incomplete. The asymmetry worth diagnosing is doctrinal closure versus incomplete openness, not virtuous design versus flawed implementation.

2.4 Ubuntu as analytical-normative instrument

Ubuntu philosophy—captured in the Nguni phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, meaning a person is a person through other persons—encodes a social ontology in which personhood is constituted through relational recognition rather than inherent in pre-social individuals. Metz has provided the most philosophically rigorous elaboration of its political implications. Three propositions are directly relevant to electoral system evaluation. First, if personhood is constituted relationally, then political institutions cannot be evaluated solely by how well they protect individual rights against the collective; they must also be assessed by whether they sustain the conditions of mutual recognition through which civic personhood is produced and reproduced. Second, legitimate collective decisions require deliberative processes genuinely reachable by all affected parties on terms reflecting equal civic standing—not merely formally accessible but substantively open. Third, deliberative procedures oriented toward consensus carry higher democratic legitimacy than majoritarian procedures, other things equal, because consensus requires active recognition of all parties rather than the subordination of some to a majority coalition.

The parallel with Western deliberative democracy is worth drawing out explicitly, because it bears directly on the question of intellectual priority that motivates this article as a whole. Habermas’s discourse ethics—the position that political norms are legitimate only insofar as they could be agreed to by all those affected, reasoning together under conditions of equal and uncoerced participation—did not reach mature articulation until Between Facts and Norms in the mid-1990s, building on communicative-action theory developed from the late 1970s onward. Ubuntu’s relational-deliberative ethic is not a recent philosophical school; it is embedded in governance practices—the kgotla, the indaba, and related institutions discussed in Section Five—that predate Habermas’s formulation by generations, and in some documented instances by centuries. The convergence is genuine: both traditions arrive at the position that legitimate collective decisions require processes reachable by all affected parties on terms of equal standing, and both reject the idea that formal procedural access is sufficient if it coexists with unequal capacity to participate in fact. But convergence is not co-origination. Ubuntu did not develop in dialogue with, in anticipation of, or in reaction to the Western deliberative turn; the Western deliberative turn arrived at conclusions Ubuntu-derived practice had already institutionalised. Recognising that priority is not a matter of scoring points in a contest of firsts. It is a direct illustration of the coloniality of knowledge described in Section 2.1: a framework is treated as a novel philosophical achievement when articulated in Frankfurt and as an ethnographic curiosity when practised in Botswana, despite the substantive convergence between them. Correcting that asymmetry is part of what it means to treat Ubuntu as a genuine analytical resource rather than a comparative footnote.

The limits of this framework must be stated before any objection arises. Ubuntu emerged from and reflects Southern African communities characterised by bounded membership, shared cosmological frameworks, and face-to-face deliberation. Transplanting its social ontology wholesale to a continental-scale polity of 335 million people with extreme religious, ethnic, and ideological diversity is neither feasible nor attempted here. What can travel across contexts—and what Section Seven defends—are the normative criteria embedded in Ubuntu’s political theory: equal relational standing among political participants, substantive inclusion in deliberative processes, institutional designs that reflect interdependence rather than atomised competition. These criteria are abstract enough to function analytically even when the specific institutional forms in which they might be realised remain matters of contextual negotiation.

2.5 The problem of perception-based indicators

A methodological tension internal to this article’s own argument must be confronted directly rather than left implicit until the limitations discussion in Section Seven. Much of the comparative evidence deployed in Section Four, and summarised in Table 1, rests on the Electoral Integrity Project’s Perceptions of Electoral Integrity index—a measure constructed by aggregating assessments from panels of country experts, most of whom are trained within, and continue to operate inside, the same broadly Western-derived comparative-politics discipline whose foundational categories Section 2.1 identifies as bearers of colonial hierarchy. If coloniality of knowledge is a genuine structural feature of the discipline, as this article maintains, then an instrument that generates ostensibly objective scores by aggregating the perceptions of experts trained within that discipline is not epistemically neutral ground on which to adjudicate the comparative standing of African and American institutions. The problem is not that expert perception data is inherently worthless; it is that treating it as a view from nowhere reproduces, at the level of method, precisely the asymmetry the article’s theoretical framework sets out to expose.

Table 1. Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) Index: selected comparators, 2022–2023.

Adapted from Norris, Wynter, and Cameron, The Year in Elections, 2022 (Electoral Integrity Project, 2023). PEI scores range from 0 (lowest integrity) to 100 (highest integrity). Sub-index scores are approximations derived from published PEI sub-index data. Global rank is approximate across approximately 169 states in the 2022 PEI dataset. United States row in bold for reference. Sub-Saharan Africa average is calculated across all PEI-covered states in the region.

Three considerations qualify, without dissolving, this tension. First, the alternative to expert perception data is not some more objective substitute waiting to be discovered; behavioural measures of Electoral Integrity—turnout, litigation counts, transfer-of-power outcomes—are used throughout this article precisely because they are less vulnerable to this problem, and PEI data is treated as corroborating rather than load-bearing evidence wherever a behavioural measure is available. Second, the direction of the bias this article would expect, if the coloniality critique is correct, is toward systematically generous treatment of the United States and systematically cautious treatment of African cases—which means that the specific comparative claims this article makes (that the US underperforms Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa on named sub-dimensions) are made against whatever bias the instrument carries, not with it. A perception-based index inclined to flatter established Western democracies that nonetheless scores the United States below several African comparators on campaign finance and boundary delimitation is, if anything, understating the case this article advances. Third, and most importantly, this tension is not fully resolvable within the scope of a single article, and the honest response is not to suppress the PEI data but to flag its epistemic status openly, use it alongside behavioural measures wherever possible, and leave open the question of what a genuinely decolonised comparative electoral-integrity instrument would need to look like—a question this article raises but does not purport to answer.

3 A note on the use of illustrative cases

This article is a work of comparative political theory that uses evidence, not an empirical study that happens to contain theory. That distinction, developed in the Introduction, has a direct methodological consequence: the 2024 electoral cycles in Senegal, South Africa, Ghana, and the United States are deployed here as illustrations of the theoretical claims developed in Section Two and Section Five, not as a hypothesis-testing sample from which causal or statistical generalisations are drawn. A brief account of how and why these cases were chosen is nonetheless owed to the reader, precisely because the choice of illustrations is never fully innocent.

Senegal, South Africa, Ghana, and the United States were selected because the 2024 electoral cycle provided rare analytical leverage: four high-stakes electoral events on two continents within the same twelve-month window, each exhibiting meaningful variation on the dimensions the theoretical framework identifies as significant—electoral system design, administrative independence, constitutional philosophical grounding, and the character of the transfer-of-power process. The three African cases were not selected to be representative of the continent; they were selected because they are among its stronger performers on established measures of Electoral Integrity and because their 2024 electoral events were substantively significant. That selection is deliberate, and Section Seven states explicitly what it does and does not license: these cases illuminate specific American structural pathologies; they do not establish that African electoral systems outperform the American system in aggregate, a claim the sub-Saharan regional average—twenty points below the United States on the PEI index—directly contradicts.

Three thematic claims organise the illustrations that follow, referenced as C1, C2, and C3 for ease of cross-reference: (C1) that constitutionally grounded, administratively independent electoral bodies tend to produce more credible and accepted results than bodies subject to partisan capture; (C2) that proportional and majority-runoff systems tend to translate political diversity into representative diversity more fully than single-member plurality systems with winner-take-all presidential electors; and (C3) that constitutional frameworks explicitly incorporating norms of equal participation tend to produce more substantively inclusive electoral processes than frameworks silent on those norms. These are illustrated by the cases that follow, not tested against them in any statistical sense; the case material is used to show what each claim looks like in practice and where its limits lie, not to generate confirming or disconfirming statistical evidence.

Two limitations of this illustrative approach are worth naming here rather than only in the concluding sections. First, illustration carries a confirmation-bias risk that a genuine test does not: cases chosen to illustrate an argument can be selected, consciously or not, because they fit it. This risk is managed, though not eliminated, by including Senegal’s own pre-2024 record of incumbency manipulation and opposition prosecution as part of the illustration rather than bracketing it out, and by stating plainly in Section Seven where the illustrative logic runs out. Second, a single electoral cycle is a snapshot, not a longitudinal record; where the argument leans on institutional durability—Ghana’s sequence of peaceful transfers, for instance—it draws on that longer record explicitly rather than resting the claim on 2024 alone.

Empirical claims are drawn from four categories of source: the Electoral Integrity Project’s PEI dataset (Norris et al., 2023) for cross-national comparison, subject to the epistemic caveats set out in Section 2.4; official electoral-authority returns for 2024 outcomes; primary constitutional and legislative texts; and peer-reviewed comparative-politics, constitutional-law, and African-studies scholarship for analytical and normative claims. No secondary aggregation of scholarly claims is treated as authoritative on its own.

4 Four structural illustrations of the US electoral order

4.1 The Electoral College: territorial privilege over popular sovereignty

Keyssar’s historical investigation reaches a conclusion that mainstream political commentary has largely marginalised: the Electoral College endures not because the Constitution renders it unchangeable—it does not; a straightforward interstate compact could enable a national popular vote—but because, at every critical juncture when meaningful reform gained traction, the political actors who benefited from the existing rules successfully obstructed change. This is a political reality, not a legal inevitability.

Three interlocking inequalities produce the distorting effects. Winner-take-all allocation at the state level renders votes for losing candidates within each state effectively meaningless in determining the national outcome. The fixed allocation of two Senate-based electors per state regardless of population systematically over-represents smaller states: Wyoming’s three electors correspond to roughly 580,000 residents, California’s fifty-four to nearly 39 million. And the concentration of contested campaigning in genuinely competitive states means that the 2024 contest effectively played out in seven states containing approximately 64 million of the nation’s 335 million people.

Comparative perspectives from African constitutions offer instructive analogies rather than ready-made prescriptions. Nigeria’s constitutional requirement that presidential candidates obtain both a nationwide plurality and at least 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds of states simultaneously addresses geographic breadth and popular legitimacy rather than trading one form of territorial weighting for another. Kenya’s 50-percent-plus-one threshold, affirmed by the Supreme Court amid considerable political strain, institutionalises the principle that presidential legitimacy must rest on authentic majority backing from the electorate as a whole. Each design reflects, in institutional form, what Ubuntu political thought makes explicit: the president’s authority is constituted through recognition by the political community in its entirety, understood as composed of individual citizens rather than as an aggregation of territorial units.

4.2 Partisan gerrymandering: constitutionalised capture

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) established that federal courts will not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims regardless of their severity, leaving state legislatures free to construct congressional and legislative maps mathematically calibrated to lock in electoral outcomes for a decade at a time. Seabrook’s empirical analysis demonstrated the practical consequences: district plans routinely deliver seat bonuses of ten percentage points or more to the map-drawing party, and these advantages persist throughout the full redistricting cycle even when voter sentiment shifts substantially.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the institutional response to equivalent risks moved in a markedly different direction. Independent electoral commissions, deliberately insulated by their constitutions from day-to-day partisan control, emerged as the institutional norm—a design that grew directly from post-independence lessons about the corrosive consequences of allowing election administrators to hold a direct stake in electoral outcomes. South Africa’s Electoral Commission, constituted under Chapter 9 of the 1996 Constitution, is appointed through a transparent multi-party parliamentary process with an explicit statutory prohibition on party membership for commissioners. Ghana’s Electoral Commission oversaw five consecutive competitive presidential elections between 2000 and 2024, several of which produced defeats for incumbent parties, against a background of gradually accumulated institutional independence and public trust.

A necessary qualification applies here: formal independence and operational independence are different realities, often dramatically so. Multiple African commissions that appear constitutionally independent operate under executive pressure or patronage networks in practice. Ghana and South Africa are among the more credible performers; they do not represent the continental norm. The continent-wide average on electoral authority independence in Norris et al.’s data sits well below the specific cases cited. The relevant analytical point is not that African commissions uniformly outperform American electoral administration but that the institutional principle—remove boundary delimitation and electoral administration from partisan control—is constitutionally standard across Africa and constitutionally absent from the United States federal framework.

4.3 Campaign finance: when political participation has a Price of entry

Total federal campaign spending in the 2024 electoral cycle reached approximately $10.5 to $11 billion. That figure is itself a consequence of the doctrine established in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), under which political expenditure is treated as constitutionally protected expression. The doctrine carries a precise structural consequence: it transforms electoral competition from a domain governed by civic equality into a domain governed by differential purchasing power. Candidates without access to major-donor networks cannot achieve electoral viability. Policy agendas are shaped before any vote is cast by the preferences of those who fund campaigns. The formal one-person-one-vote principle inside the polling booth therefore coexists with a structurally different ordering principle in the surrounding environment—one in which some voices carry exponentially greater weight than others by virtue of financial resources.

Metz’s Ubuntu-derived concept of substantive relational equality is directly applicable here. Relational equality requires not merely that all citizens formally participate in elections but that the processes through which electoral decisions are shaped reflect equal civic standing in practice. A system that structurally routes the most politically consequential decisions—candidate selection, agenda-setting, post-election policy access—through those with the greatest financial resources defeats this requirement without violating any single formal rule. It is a systemic failure, not a procedural one.

4.4 Structural duopoly and the suppression of political pluralism

The American two-party system is not a preference expressed through deliberate popular choice; it is a structural artefact inherited through institutional design. Single-member plurality districts, restrictive ballot access thresholds, winner-take-all presidential electors, and incumbent-advantaging campaign finance networks jointly sustain the duopoly against challengers regardless of the underlying distribution of political opinion. The mechanism is the strategic voting trap: supporting a third party in a single-member plurality contest risks handing victory to the voter’s least-preferred major candidate, rendering sincere preference expression individually irrational even for voters with no genuine attachment to either major party.

South Africa’s 2024 National Assembly returned fourteen parties to parliament—none of them mathematical accidents—because the closed-list proportional representation system converts vote shares directly into seat shares. Kenya’s mixed system combines constituency seats with party-list seats reserved for women, youth, and persons with disabilities, thereby attempting to balance representational breadth against geographic accountability. Each design involves genuine trade-offs: weaker constituency accountability, concentrated power in party hierarchies, coalition instability. The American system does not make these trade-offs consciously; it forecloses one side of the balance entirely and presents the resulting truncation as natural.

4.5 Electoral integrity in comparative perspective

Table 1 presents Perceptions of Electoral Integrity scores from Norris et al. for cases directly relevant to this article’s comparative argument. The epistemic caveats attaching to this data are addressed directly in Section 2.4 and are not repeated here; the table should be read with that discussion in mind. The table requires careful reading in both directions. The US overall score of 64 sits comparably to Ghana (63) and below South Africa (69), Botswana (66), Mauritius (82), and Cape Verde (73). On campaign finance specifically, the US score of 41 falls below Ghana (55), Botswana (60), and South Africa (64). On boundary delimitation, the US score of 55 underperforms all higher-performing African comparators. These are not incidental findings; they map directly onto the structural illustrations above.

Table 1 also documents what this article neither claims nor conceals: the sub-Saharan African average across all eleven PEI dimensions is 44, twenty points below the United States. The argument is not that Africa democratically outperforms America; it is that specific high-performing African cases illuminate specific American institutional failures. The case selection is theoretically motivated and makes no claims about continental averages.

5 African political philosophy as democratic resource

5.1 Deliberative traditions and their institutional legacies

Ubuntu’s deliberative implications are not abstractions—they are visible in governance institutions that predate the academic deliberative democracy literature by generations. The kgotla, the Tswana public assembly, requires that all adult community members speak before decisions are reached; it is oriented toward consensus rather than majority imposition; and it has influenced Botswana’s district governance design since independence. The indaba of Nguni-speaking communities shaped South Africa’s 1993–1994 constitutional negotiating process, where its insistence on sustained multi-party engagement toward mutually acceptable outcomes was adopted as a deliberate methodological choice over the available alternative of allowing the strongest coalition to dictate terms.

That the indaba format has travelled beyond Southern Africa is significant. At the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, a Senegalese facilitation team introduced an indaba process as a breakdown mechanism among 196 parties—direct principal-to-principal engagement explicitly oriented toward identifying mutually acceptable outcomes rather than outcomes preferred by the most powerful parties. It worked in that specific context because it structured deliberation around the relational conditions Ubuntu political theory identifies as constitutive of legitimate collective decision-making: equal standing, genuine listening, orientation toward shared outcome.

Section 2.3 develops the philosophical relationship between Ubuntu and Habermasian deliberative democracy directly, including the question of intellectual priority. What the institutional record recounted here adds to that discussion is concrete: the kgotla and the indaba are not abstract philosophical positions but working decision-making institutions with documented histories, and their travel into settings as different as the Paris climate negotiations demonstrates that the relational-deliberative logic Section 2.3 describes is portable in practice, not only in principle.

5.2 Pan-African democratic theory: resources and complications

Nyerere and Nkrumah each argued that African communal traditions constituted a superior basis for genuinely participatory democracy than the competitive individualism of capitalist liberal politics. Both were wrong in practice: Nyerere’s Tanzania and Nkrumah’s Ghana became single-party states whose theoretical frameworks were mobilised to justify precisely the political monopoly those frameworks purported to oppose. Young is right that this history demands engagement, not minimisation.

The intellectually honest response is to disaggregate the philosophical substance from the authoritarian institutional record. Two observations are relevant. First, the gap between democratic theory and undemocratic practice is not an African problem exclusively: the distance between the democratic ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the constitutional protection of chattel slavery in a republic governed by slaveholders is perhaps the most consequential instance of that gap in modern history. Second, contemporary Pan-African democratic scholarship has done the work of disaggregation. Mkandawire and Metz each articulate robust commitments to electoral pluralism and civil liberties while contesting the assumption that Western institutional forms are the necessary vehicle for realising those values. That distinction—between substantive democratic values and the particular institutional forms any specific tradition evolved to embody them—is what creates space for genuine comparative learning.

5.3 Constitutional innovation: South Africa and Kenya

South Africa’s 1996 Constitution extended justiciable socioeconomic rights to housing, healthcare, food, water, and education. It established Chapter 9 institutions—the Public Protector, Human Rights Commission, Electoral Commission—each constitutionally insulated from executive direction. And it grounded the entire constitutional order explicitly in Ubuntu values of human dignity and equal worth. Klug demonstrated how two years of multi-party negotiation produced a document that drew on German, Indian, Canadian, and other constitutional traditions while insisting on philosophical grounding in South African experience rather than straightforward transplantation.

Kenya’s 2010 Constitution responded directly to the 1,300 deaths of the 2007–2008 post-electoral crisis with targeted institutional reforms: 47 devolved county governments with genuine fiscal authority, a mixed electoral system adding party-list seats for women and marginalised groups to constituency representation, a 50-percent-plus-one presidential majority threshold, and a gender rule prohibiting any gender from holding more than two-thirds of appointed or elected public offices. Implementation has been partial and contested—the gender provision especially has not been fully realised. But constitutional articulation of the principle, enforceable through judicial review, represents a design choice the American constitutional order has never made and that the comparative literature has insufficiently recognised.

6 Illustrating the framework: the 2024 electoral evidence

Table 2 maps 2024 electoral outcomes against the three thematic claims (C1–C3) introduced in Section Three. The table is illustrative rather than a test in the statistical sense; the narrative sections below show what each claim looks like in the cases at hand and where the case material complicates or qualifies it.

Table 2. 2024 Electoral outcomes mapped against three thematic claims (C1–C3).

FPTP, first-past-the-post; PR, proportional representation; IEC, independent electoral commission; GNU, government of national unity; CENA, commission électorale nationale autonome; Ch., Chapter. US data from FEC (2024); Senegal from Krönke and Logan (2024); South Africa from Southall (2024); Ghana from Electoral Commission of Ghana (2024). Key limitations drawn from sources cited in the body text.

6.1 Senegal and C1: administrative Independence under pressure

Senegal’s 2024 electoral cycle provides the sharpest available illustration of C1. When Macky Sall announced an indefinite postponement of the presidential election by executive decree in February, the Constitutional Council overturned it within 72 h—an act of institutional autonomy directly illustrating C1’s central claim. The mechanism that drove the outcome was precisely the institutional configuration the claim identifies: a constitutional court sufficiently independent to rule against the sitting head of state, and an electoral commission sufficiently credible to administer the election on a compressed timeline.

The Senegalese case illustrates C1, but the limitations documented in Table 2 are not decorative. Sall’s tenure involved selective prosecution of opposition figures, press restrictions, and—most consequentially—the detention of the man who would become president on charges his supporters regarded as politically motivated. The 2024 outcome is best characterised as institutional correction within a still-imperfect system rather than as evidence of comprehensively healthy democracy. What the Senegalese case demonstrates is that specific institutional mechanisms can function under specific conditions of acute pressure—not that Senegal has resolved the problems its own political history has created.

6.2 South Africa and C2–C3: coalition democracy and its discontents

South Africa’s 2024 election illustrates C2 most directly. The ANC’s fall below 40 percent—its worst result since the transition—produced a hung parliament. In a winner-take-all system, 40 percent with a plurality might still produce a governing majority. Under closed-list proportional representation, it produced fourteen-party legislative fragmentation and a Government of National Unity negotiated over five weeks—precisely the outcome C2 anticipates: proportional systems convert political diversity into representative diversity and compel cross-partisan accommodation.

On C3, the analysis requires qualification. The GNU’s coalition statement invokes the language of shared responsibility and national unity, which resonates with Ubuntu’s communitarian conception of political community. However, the GNU’s Statement of Intent emphasises pragmatic power-sharing arrangements rather than explicit Ubuntu philosophical commitments. Ubuntu is present in the broader political culture within which the negotiation occurred; it is not the explicit framework of the founding document itself. Attributing coherent Ubuntu philosophy to what was simultaneously a hard-nosed negotiation among parties with conflicting interests and competing patronage networks would overstate the philosophical content of a political bargain. The GNU illustrates C2 clearly; it illustrates C3 only partially and with important qualification.

6.3 Ghana and C1: institutional trust as accumulated capital

Ghana’s December 2024 presidential election extended its unbroken sequence to four consecutive peaceful transfers of power between rival parties—a record built through the democratic opening of 2000, tested severely in the narrow margins of 2008 and 2016, and sustained in 2024. The Electoral Commission’s administration of the vote was characterised by transparent counting procedures, prompt results declaration, and the absence of serious procedural challenge. The losing party’s same-day concession following the official declaration reflected the accumulated institutional trust that Ghana’s Commission has built across successive electoral cycles rather than the outcome of any single administrative decision.

Ghana, like the United States, operates a first-past-the-post system—as does Botswana, where the 2024 election produced the first change of ruling party since independence in 1966. These two cases jointly caution against electoral system determinism. The administrative independence factor has operated effectively in first-past-the-post settings. The variable that mattered most in both Ghana and Botswana was not the voting formula but the real-world credibility and operational independence of the institution administering the contest. That institutional insight travels across electoral system types.

7 Objections, limits, and the logic of mutual learning

7.1 The transferability problem

The deepest objection to deploying Ubuntu-based criteria against American electoral arrangements is direct: a social ontology rooted in the lived reality of small, bounded, face-to-face communities cannot bear the analytical load this article places on it when transposed to a vast, diverse, continental-scale liberal democracy with a strongly individualistic political culture. The objection carries genuine weight and is not dismissed.

The response proceeds in two parts. First, the same objection applies with equivalent force to the common practice of transplanting Habermasian deliberative democracy—a framework forged in mid-twentieth-century Frankfurt—into African constitutional settings. Scholars and practitioners of international constitutionalism do this routinely and, when handled with proper contextual sensitivity, the practice has generated meaningful insights. The problem with moving ideas across cultural contexts is not that such transfers are inherently illegitimate; it is that they demand honest reckoning with the costs and limits of translation. This article meets that demand by consistently distinguishing the core normative criteria that Ubuntu offers—equal relational standing, genuine inclusion, orientation toward mutual recognition—from the particular institutional forms through which those criteria might be realised inside a large liberal polity. The normative criteria travel; the specific institutional forms do not, and no claim is made that they do.

Second, the Ubuntu lens does not carry the entire analytical weight of the institutional case advanced here. The comparative evidence on independent electoral commissions, proportional representation, and campaign finance equality stands on its own in the political science literature independently of any philosophical framing. Ubuntu supplies a consistent normative language for evaluating that evidence against a coherent set of values. The two components are connected but not mutually dependent; the institutional argument survives even where the philosophical argument may be contested.

7.2 African democratic fragility: evidence that cannot be footnoted away

The sub-Saharan African average of 44 on the PEI index is not a marginal statistic. It reflects a regional context marked by a resurgence of military coups since 2020, constitutional courts facing sustained executive pressure that hollows out their formal autonomy, and numerous elections that function more as legitimation rituals for incumbent rule than as authentic mechanisms of democratic accountability. Levitsky and Way developed their competitive authoritarianism framework partly by drawing on African cases precisely because the continent has provided numerous clear instances of formally democratic institutions being progressively emptied of democratic substance.

The three primary African cases in this analysis were selected because they constitute the most analytically significant African electoral episodes of 2024 and because they rank among the continent’s stronger performers on established integrity measures. The selection is deliberate and theoretically driven; these cases sit at the upper tail of a highly uneven distribution. That must be stated explicitly in the body of the argument, not managed through footnotes. Even with this concession, the central claim survives: the upper tail of African democratic performance yields genuine comparative insights for reform debates in the United States. But intellectual honesty requires that the concession be made prominently and that the regional average not be downplayed in order to strengthen the cases selected.

7.3 A final word on illustration versus proof

The methodological posture of this article, introduced in Section Three, bears brief restatement here in light of the case material just discussed. Illustration is not proof, and this article has not claimed otherwise. What the Senegalese, South African, and Ghanaian material demonstrates is that the theoretical claims developed in Sections Two and Five describe real institutional dynamics with recognisable analogues in contemporary practice—not that those claims have been confirmed against a representative sample or that African institutional design has been shown to be superior in some general sense. The distinction matters for how the article’s contribution should be understood: it is a contribution to political theory that uses institutional evidence to sharpen its diagnostic categories, not an empirical study that happens to discuss theory.

8 Conclusion

What changes when comparative democratic theory takes African intellectual traditions seriously as primary analytical resources rather than as objects of analysis? This article has addressed that question in a specific domain, and the answer is: a good deal changes. Four structural features of the American electoral order appear more contingent, more reformable, and more philosophically objectionable on their own terms when examined through lenses that Ubuntu normative theory, African constitutional design, and the PEI comparative data jointly provide.

The Electoral College’s territorial weighting of votes conflicts with Ubuntu’s relational egalitarianism and has no parallel in post-independence African constitutional design. Partisan redistricting’s status as a non-justiciable political question sits in sharp contrast to the institutional principle of administrative independence from partisan control that has become constitutionally standard across sub-Saharan Africa. The campaign finance doctrine’s equation of political expenditure with protected speech defeats the substantive relational equality that Ubuntu political theory requires—a foreclosure at the level of doctrine that most African comparators, whatever their implementation shortfalls, have not made. And structural duopoly’s suppression of minority political voices produces a two-party legislature in a country whose underlying political community is irreducibly plural.

The 2024 comparative evidence illustrates, with qualification, the three thematic claims developed in Section Three. Senegal’s institutional correction of executive overreach illustrates C1. South Africa’s coalition governance experiment illustrates C2. Ghana’s fourth consecutive peaceful alternation illustrates C1 across a different electoral system type. None of the African cases is offered as a democratic ideal; each carries the limitations documented in Table 2 and elaborated in Section Seven. The analytical gain is not a new benchmark for democratic aspiration. It is a set of diagnostic instruments—sharpened by comparative exposure to institutional alternatives and philosophical traditions the dominant literature has undervalued—that render familiar pathologies newly visible.

The broader point is methodological. Epistemic reciprocity is not a concession to relativism. It is a precondition for rigorous comparative analysis. A field that treats African political philosophy only as object of study and African governance experience only as cautionary baseline has arbitrarily restricted its own analytical resources.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Footnotes

Edited by: Samuel Oyewole, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Reviewed by: Zim Nwokora, Deakin University, Australia

George Asekere, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana