Our task was not helped by the fact that the civil service had been prevented by the Cameron government from making any preparations for a leave vote. In fact, the civil service and No. 10 generally were still in a state of shock. The only real European policy experts all came from the ‘Remain’ side of the fence. While their professionalism was not in doubt, it was clearly going to be a huge task for them to pivot to embrace the new reality of the UK’s changed status with the EU. It wasn’t long before the UK’s long-serving Ambassador to the EU, Ivan Rogers, was moved on. His expertise was never in question, but in the weekly meetings with the Prime Minister in her study behind the Cabinet Room, he barely sought to disguise his dismay at the UK’s decision. Treating Brexit as a problem to be managed rather than an opportunity to be seized was never going to go down well with the Brexiteers still drunk on their own success. What Ivan saw as pragmatism, the Brexiteers saw as pessimism. He quickly became public enemy number one and was swiftly replaced.

Only one person can answer as to the sincerity of the decision Boris made to back leave. The now infamous two articles allow his enemies to present his decision as an act of calculating duplicity for which they will forever believe him guilty. This perhaps also provides a focus for the real cause of their angst – that he beat them. I can only observe that I saw him use this device often in decision-making. Whatever motivated his decision in February 2016, he certainly owned it from there on. Johnson’s arrival as the public face of leave brought energy and stardust to the campaign. New voters seemed to ‘have permission’ to vote leave because of Johnson’s arrival. He moved the centre of gravity of the campaign away from the purely Faragist proposition. A good test of the effectiveness of the message was in the reaction of some of the arch-Brexiteers. Supreme bores like Bernard Jenkin deeply resented Johnson, whom they regarded as a Johnny-come-lately. Those not stuck in the time warp of 1992–7 rejoiced at it.

Chapter 4 engages the average people behind these trends. In particular, it tells the stories of Hungarians compelled to leave after the reelection of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to a fourth consecutive term with a parliamentary supermajority, Serbs crestfallen after the reelection of President Aleksandar Vučić to a second term, and Russians fleeing the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine and subsequent domestic crackdown on dissent. Some mundane, some extraordinary, their first-person narratives display the household considerations behind a mass population phenomenon. The chapter then leverages a unique study of European public opinion to reveal the way that Eastern Europeans who move West under the European Union’s free mobility rules likely hold more liberal democratic proclivities than those in their countries of origin who wish to migrate, and how those prospective migrants hold more liberal democratic proclivities than those of their countrymen who don’t wish to move at all – a sliding scale of liberal democratic views among people with the same origins.

Chapter 3 takes a closer look at the mechanics of Democratic Drain. More specifically, it asks when demigrants are likely to depart. Focusing on 127 countries worldwide, it finds that people’s interest in emigrating spikes in the immediate aftermath of national elections when an authoritarian-leaning party or ruler is elected to public office. Importantly, this effect is limited only to people who hold expectations of democratic norms and institutional integrity. Those who question the honesty of the election, suspect corruption among public officials, or feel that freedom of speech is constrained are significantly more likely to say they would like to leave when faced with the future deconsolidation of their country’s democratic institutions. This shows the way that elections are precipitating events for individuals disappointed by the results and concerned about the future of their civil life. Previously unnoticed over the ebb and flow of electoral cycles, Democratic Drain removes the people who are most likely to voice their dissatisfaction and most likely to demand institutional integrity in less democratic spaces.

Chapter 3 offers an initial empirical assessment of the book’s main argument. It begins by identifying the partisan Left and Right in postcommunist Europe and analyzing patterns of their programmatic positions and ballot box results. The findings support the theoretical expectation that the long-term economic stances and electoral performance of the Left, but not of the Right, are two mutually related legacies of postcommunist junctures. Next, having developed a set of variables to compare long- and short-term electoral effects on the Left, I show that the former are the stronger predictor of illiberal electoral outcomes. The chapter closes with a discussion of why rival arguments prioritizing economic, political, and cultural demand, institutional and leadership supply, and international factors fail to adequately explain the variation identified in book’s opening chapter. This point is empirically reinforced in Appendix D, where I test the plausibility of the postcommunist juncture theory vis-à-vis rival hypotheses by using an original dataset and standard statistical methods for cross-sectional and time series data. The results show that the long-term regularities rooted in postcommunist junctures explain illiberal electoral outcomes in the most significant and consistent way.

This chapter examines the enumeration of ethnic populations in the census, where ‘the tribe question’ has been included since 1948. I trace its evolution – from its origins as self-evidently important with a self-evident list of groups – through numerous changes up to 2019. The powerful social imaginary of ‘42+ tribes’ comes from the 1969 census, despite the numerous changes since then. I show how changes in classifications over time, as well as the way they have been used and narrated by the state, reveal the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting ethnicity. In the colonial period, this centred on ethnic population distribution to support indirect rule via ethnicity, as well as tax collection and labour control. In the postcolonial period, ethnic demographic posturing for electoral purposes or ‘the tyranny of numbers’ became a major driver of interest in ‘the tribe question’. However, since 2009, the census has also been a site of recognition for minorities and of the painting of a portrait of a nation defined by its diversity. In this chapter, I also show how the quintessentially unambiguous nature of ethnic census codes has been rendered ambiguous in useful ways.

This chapter theorises ethnicity as a mode of thought and identification around which ways of being, acting and relating are organised. It is one among many possible anchors for identification, solidarity and difference, though it is the most prominent in Kenya. I discuss how this became so, describing identity and community before colonialism, and offering a history of how ethnicity organised social life under and after colonial rule, especially around elections. I provide a sketch of varied ethnic identifications in Kenya, demonstrating immense variety, not all of which obviously fit an ethnic framework, and many of which entail politics quite different from the ‘big 5’ which dominate studies of elections. Finally, I situate the case of Kenya in a comparative context, highlighting key features of how ethnic classification has operated in Kenya, including reification, colonial penetration, nationhood, demography, and differences between direct and diffuse effects of identification. This section shows that both ethnicity and its classification can be conducive to pluralism and solidarity in Kenya, but perhaps not in other contexts.

By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

This chapter covers the current state of knowledge on the relationship between terrorism and voter’s preferences and political attitudes. Theoretical models deliver very often ambiguous predictions since, on the one hand, voters may want to punish incumbents for their lack of competence in preventing terrorist attacks but, on the other hand, the “rally-around-the-flag” effect can benefit them. The empirical evidence shows that terrorist attacks change the political preferences of voters and the result of elections. Terrorist attacks usually increase the participation of voters and, in general, the support for right-wing parties since they are perceived by the population as stronger against terrorism than left-wing parties. The effect is stronger the closer is the terrorist attack to the data of the election. Despite these improvements in our knowledge on the empirical relationship between terrorism and political attitudes, there is a need to move to more credible empirical methodologies using natural experiments or agent-based models.

The reintroduction of multiparty elections threatened the survival of the Togolese regime, but they also represented an opportunity to remove potential enemies in neighbouring countries. In Togo, the transition to multiparty elections initiated a period of power contestation where the dictatorial regime of Gnassingbé Eyadema had to adapt, and by doing so, used cross-border mechanisms to its advantage. Chapter 8 shows the implications of cross-border voting in the international relations between Ghana and Togo when Rawlings and Eyadéma used elections in an attempt to topple each other in the 1990s. As a consequence, the chapter concludes on showing the far-reaching international consequences of the ways in which the local level scales up to the national and the transnational levels.

The chapter examines how moral rhetoric is used in party communication using dictionary-based text analysis of party manifestos. The main data include 158 manifestos from six English-speaking democracies (Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States) across thirty-four elections. I first measure moral rhetoric in the aggregate. The measure captures the overall level of moral rhetoric used by a party in its campaign. I show that there is variation in moral rhetoric across countries and within countries. I also show the validity of the measurement approach and its robustness to alternatives. Overall, we learn that moral rhetoric is a distinct aspect of party messaging. I then explore patterns in more disaggregate measures of moral rhetoric. Analyses reveal that there are more commonalities in the ways that parties use moral rhetoric than one might expect. Building on the framework of the Moral Foundations Theory, I find that differences in the moral palettes of the left and the right that we can expect based on prior work are more nuanced and not as stark when we examine specific moral foundations separately and when we examine appeals at the level of issues.

This chapter reviews literature on game-theoretic analysis of voting. Both cooperative and noncooperative concepts are used to answer questions, such as, How do candidates or parties propose alternatives to voters in strategic interactions? Why do voters vote? What are the implications of asymmetric information for candidates’ and voters’ incentives? Do prevoting deliberations improve information sharing? If so, through what type of rules? Sophisticated voters may act strategically, and therefore it matters whether one’s choices are pivotal. In the presence of private information, the mechanism design approach is highly appropriate, as voters’ incentives can be heavily influenced by the institutional settings that determine how votes are transformed to election outcomes. The analysis of information aggregation in large-scale elections brings important insights to our understanding of representative democracy. Due to the nonexistence of a core and the cyclical structure of pairwise comparison, there may be a fundamental difficulty in the preference aggregation by majoritarian democracy in large-scale elections. The chapter concludes with questions for future research: How does the limitation of preference/information aggregation in large-scale elections affect the stability of representative democracy? What determines the robustness of democratic norms? What is the role of the media in the presence of information asymmetry, particularly in ideological battles where information filtering can play an exacerbating role?