Atlas / Organisations / Malawian Alternation
Malawian Alternation
1994– · Malawi · Competitive Blocs · Electoral party · coding confidence medium
Each axis runs from −10 to +10, with zero a genuine mixed or balanced position rather than an absence of opinion. A score describes a stated position and a governing record; it is not a judgement of merit. What each score means →
Core principles
A poor agrarian democracy whose courts annulled a presidential election for fraud and whose opposition then won the rerun.
Economic model
Tobacco exports, fertiliser subsidy programmes, heavy aid dependence.
Organisation of powers
The constitutional court annulled the 2019 presidential result in 2020, only the second such annulment in African history.
Reading note
Included because the judiciary, not the street or the army, was the decisive institution.
Check a claim about Malawian Alternation. The interactive atlas measures the distance between any two organisations across all six axes and shows which ones carry the disagreement.
Open in the atlasThe evidence for every score
All six cells are sourced. A rationale explains what the score is measuring and each artefact is something a third party can check without taking anyone's word for it.
EC · Economic organisation · scored +03
Coded +3: tobacco exports with a large fertiliser subsidy programme.
- Documented act or statuteThe farm input subsidy programme has consumed a substantial share of the national budget since 2005.
CU · Social and cultural order · scored +06
Coded +6: religiously conservative with criminalised same-sex relations.
- Documented act or statuteThe constitutional court upheld the criminalisation in 2024.
AU · Organisation of power · scored −02
Coded −2: a presidential election annulled for fraud, and the rerun won by the opposition.
- Documented act or statuteThe constitutional court annulled the 2019 result in February 2020, only the second such ruling in African history, and it was upheld on appeal.
SC · Scale of decision · scored +03
Coded +3: a unitary state with district councils.
- Documented act or statuteLocal government elections were restored in 2014 after fourteen years without them.
ID · Rule of membership · scored +03
Coded +3: regional voting blocs within civic citizenship.
- ScholarshipVoting correlates strongly with region, though parties compete nationally.
CH · Method and tempo · scored −06
Coded −6: constitutional throughout, including through the annulment.
- Documented act or statuteThe outgoing president accepted the rerun result and left office.
Nearest organisations by measured distance
Straight-line separation across all six axes, out of a maximum of 49.0. Proximity means similarity of stated position, not endorsement and not resemblance in outcome.
- Ennahda1.0
- Ghanaian Party Blocs1.7
- Zambian Alternation1.7
- Post-War Liberia2.6
- Iranian Reformists3.0
- Botswana Democratic Party3.2
Countries
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Scores are revised on evidence, so a citation should carry the version it refers to. Version 4.3.1 is current; the revision log records every change.
Free to quote and reproduce with attribution. This is a synthesis rather than a peer-reviewed dataset — where an authoritative figure is needed, cite the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Manifesto Project or V-Dem.