The two 21st century post-war elections in Liberia have revealed a fractured political party geography. This is all the more remarkable given the country’s de facto one-party state for a century up to 1980 and patterns in nearby countries such as Sierra Leone and Ghana where two consolidated parties vie for power. Indeed, in Liberia in both 2005 and 2011, small parties and independents won seats stretched out across the country, no party dominated the legislature, and none of the larger parties, including the ruling Unity Party, secured a clean sweep of seats in presumed county strongholds. With Africa’s first elected woman head of state -- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf -- stepping down as president and a partial political vacuum thus appearing at the top, an opposition coalition led by former footballer, George Weah, wrested power from the incumbent party in the 2017 elections. Remarkably, however, political parties continued to splinter. Further, jockeying for coalition partners and examples of floor-crossing littered the political environment throughout the electoral process, which encompassed legislative and first round presidential polls and, after allegations of fraud and a severe delay, presidential run-off elections.
Several questions arise. Does Liberia exhibit post-party political tendencies and why? Is this a new kind of democratic dispensation? And if the Liberian electorate votes not on the basis of party loyalties, what are their actual motivations? This paper investigates Liberia’s 2017 elections from the vantage point of on-the-ground fieldwork, intensive scrutiny of the results and comparison with previous polls. It is hypothesised that instead of loyalty to post-war parties, Liberian voters more often make choices based on local, national or transnational considerations, the latter being particularly significant in Liberia’s case. Forty years ago in ground-breaking work, Peter Ekeh framed his understanding of Nigerian politics on the dialectic between local and national authorities. Although Ekeh did not consider his framework within party politics or with transnationalism as a lens of analysis, it is within the context of the 2017 Liberian elections that we test his thinking.