Enhancing or Constraining Democratic Elections? A Comparative Study of Constitutional Courts in Madagascar and Senegal and Their Interventions into Electoral Matters (1992-2012)

While it is a widespread scholarly assumption that constitutional courts are beneficial for democracy, studies on the actual democratic repercussions of these courts are rare. This paper takes specifically the field of electoral disputes as an example by which to examine the influence of constitutional courts on democracy. In a comparative study, it examines how the constitutional courts of Madagascar and Senegal contributed to the democratic quality of elections in the period between 1992 and 2012. For this purpose, it applies a novel theoretical framework that captures how constitutional court behaviour is linked, through their functional, ambiguous or dysfunctional interventions, to democratic elections. The framework further disentangles how the three qualities of democratic elections – participation, competition and legitimacy – are at stake throughout the electoral cycle. This paper builds on an original dataset of 106 constitutional court decisions. The qualitative analysis of these decisions is embedded in data from expert interviews and secondary sources. The paper reveals that the constitutional courts of Madagascar and Senegal responded to constraints on competition and legitimacy with predominantly dysfunctional interventions. The interventions of the Madagascan High Constitutional Court had, however, more serious repercussions on the democratic quality of elections.