| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines more closely the mechanisms that lie behind the causal relationship between electoral contestation and violent intrastate conflict identified by Henrikas Bartusevičius and Svend-Erik Skaaning in their 2018 article “Revisiting Democratic Civil Peace: Electoral Regimes and Civil Conflict”. By using a nested-analysis research design the thesis first tests whether the causal patterns identified by Bartusevisčuis and Skaaning’s global analysis, also are present within a limited geographical region, Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the logistic regression, the standardized residuals of each observation within Sub-Saharan Africa is calculated in order to identify the samples’ deviant and pathway case, namely Madagascar (Deviant) and Congo (Kinshasa) (Pathway). The analysis reveals that there are three main mechanisms behind the causal relationship between electoral contestation and intrastate conflict; Substitution, Inclusion and Constraints on Repression. Both Madagascar and Congo (Kinshasa) have similar stories of dominating party systems and executive dominance both over time and within the political system being challenged in the 1990s. But where Madagascar was successful in taming this revolt through different means of increasing electoral contestation, Congo (Kinshasa) were unable to stop the tensions within society from developing, eventually leading to a civil war, causing more than 4 million people to lose their lives in the two Congolese Wars around the millennium mark. By evaluating the mechanisms within Madagascar and Congo (Kinshasa), using indicators of each mechanism’s outplay, it is revealed that the Congolese regime’s executive fumigation of the political system effectively created zero space for any of the mechanisms to play out. This resulted in the effective closing off of any potential development and/or increase of electoral contestation. Combined with the destabilization of Eastern Congo following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, this created a deadly mixture leading to the occurrence of two civil wars. On the contrary, Madagascar was able to create a disruption in the executive domination of Didier Ratsiraka, a disruption that allowed the oppositional powers to develop democratic institutions, as well as a channel of non-violent participation. The country’s ethnic and religious diversity in combination with the neo-patrimonial legacy of the African continent allowed marginalized groups of society to be included in the policy processes through seats in the cabinet. This led to the fulfillment of all three mechanisms, an increase in electoral contestation and the effective stop to a potential civil war following the transition, especially with regard to the tensions arising from the hotly contested 2001 elections. | eng |