police and judiciary – although the latter more successfully than the former – while the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) was disbanded and replaced by the new Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). Efforts were also made to change political behaviour through the institutionalisation of political parties, and closer monitoring and prosecution of incitement and organised violence, through new rules and regulations and intervention of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate those deemed most responsible for the post-election violence of 2007/8. A number of important lessons can be drawn from these processes. First, institutional reforms and interventions had a strong impact on the way in which political actors and their supporters responded to the result. Because the electoral commission and the judiciary had recently been reformed and enjoyed extremely high levels of public confidence and international support going into the election, Odinga was left with little option but to go to the Supreme Court with his complaints, and then accept its verdict. In turn, high expectations of devolution served to mitigate popular dissatisfaction with the presidential election in opposition strongholds due to CORD’s success in K e n y a ’s 2 0 1 3 e l e c t i o n : L e s s o n s f o r d emo c r a c y p r omo t i o n securing control of new county governments. At the same time, closer monitoring of hate speech throughout the campaign, and the fear of international prosecutions for human rights abuses, served to curtail incitement and political violence. However, while institutional reforms increased public confidence in key political processes and thus rendered violence less likely, they were less successful in changing other aspects of political behaviour. For example, the new constitution and associated legislation had sought to encourage the emergence of a new kind of political party that would promote internal democracy with the aim of ending the dominant pattern of ‘big man’ clientele politics and ushering in a new period of popular involvement in determining party policy. However, this simply did not happen, as shambolic party primaries and ongoing practices of voter bribery demonstrated. Such institutional reforms failed for two reasons. First, nothing was actually done to change the incentive structures facing political leaders or to inculcate a different set of expectations amongst their supporters. Second, in the face of outright defiance by political leaders, the IEBC and the judiciary drew back from enforcing the laws at key moments. Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14 23 Kenya general elections, March 2013 Commonwealth Secretariat
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