This article describes and explains patterns of electoral governance in Africa's emerging democracies through a systematic examination of election management bodies (embs), the formal units principally responsible for the organization and conduct of elections. The effectiveness of embs as institutional linchpins of electoral governance depends largely, but not exclusively, on their autonomy from the government. The article measures the degree of autonomy of embs as an indicator of the varying patterns of electoral governance in Africa's emerging democracies and employs an ordered probit model to account for them. The model confirms the expected combined effects of the institutional legacies of colonial governance and postcolonial neopatrimonial regimes, ethnopolitical fragmentation and political negotiations over new democratic institutions on the relative autonomy of embs. Predicted probabilities calculated from the probit coefficients accurately predict the separate impact of each independent variable on the likelihood of African countries choosing non-autonomous, semi-autonomous or autonomous embs.
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