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5 - Creating Democrats

Civil Society and Voter Education

from Part I - Promoting Civic Virtue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2020

Nic Cheeseman
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Gabrielle Lynch
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Justin Willis
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

This chapter investigates civil society efforts to cultivate civic virtue through voter education programmes. We distinguish between five types of voter education: information, mobilisation, decision-making, comportment, and vigilance. Despite important differences within and between countries, we highlight how voter education efforts across all three countries seek to create "good citizens" who vote for "good leaders" by encouraging voters to internalize a civic, rather than patrimonial, register of virtue. This work has an important electoral effect and helps to imagine the Idea of civil society as a form of associational life that is of, and for, society and separate from, and capable of checking the state. At the same time, we show how, while these efforts have had some successes, they often inadvertently help to reinforce a patrimonial register – with voter education campaigns often undermined by a misunderstanding of the “problems” that need to be solved, by a failure to provide clear moral direction when other actors do not adhere to official rules, and by the complex and often contradictory roles played by civil society actors themselves. Thus, while voter education is broadly similar across all three countries, the impact is contingent on local contexts

Type
Chapter
Information
The Moral Economy of Elections in Africa
Democracy, Voting and Virtue
, pp. 175 - 208
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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