Faculty of Administrative and Political Social Sciences

Department of Political and Administrative Sciences

Thesis ppresented and publicly supported with a view to obtaining the Grade of Doctor of Political Science

By

IYOKA OTANGELA-N'kumu Jean-Bedel, Graduate of Advanced Studies in Political Science

Professor Sébastien KIRONGOZI B. Limbaya, Promoter

Professor Jean-Berchmans LABANA LASAY'Abar, Co-Promoter

December 2022

SUMMARY

Our thesis is based on a paradigm. It asserts that democracy is a market. If, in the economic sense, the market confronts buyers and sellers of goods and services around money as an exchange value, the democratic market confronts political representatives and the people—more strictly speaking, citizen voters—around power as a market value.
For more than three decades, but more specifically, for seventeen years, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been engaged in a process of rehabilitating its representative democracy. However, one thing is clear and widely shared by public opinion in general, and even by eminent political scientists. The vast majority are skeptical, even particularly distrustful, about the quality of our country's democratic project.
The purpose of this research is therefore to assess the viability of Congolese representative democracy in a context marked by recurring electoral crises. We rely on the analysis of "electoral practices" as an explanatory variable.
Electoral practices are understood here as the set of behaviors and modalities of citizen control, which transcend the simple calendar electoral moment. They certainly take into account the quality of the one-off electoral choice, but they also integrate, much more, the modalities, quality, and recurrence of citizen monitoring of institutions and their leaders throughout the mandate. The electoral moment is by nature fundamentally precarious in terms of the provision of democracy.
The central question is whether the systematic crises observed during the three electoral cycles and the electoral practices that have developed since 2005 call into question the emergence of a viable representative democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
At the end of our heuristic process, we note that neither elections, whatever their level of credibility, nor institutional reforms, whatever their scope and rigor, are decisive in guaranteeing a viable and qualitative supply of democracy. This is contrary to what is generally accepted. Good elections and efficient institutional reforms are not the driving force of a viable democracy. Rather, they are its consequences. Only a vigorous demand for democracy by the people, also supported by a favorable internal and external dynamic, is likely to influence a democratic habitus within the elites and, thus, force the representatives (governors) to offer a viable democracy. The law of vigorous demand and supply of democracy that we develop suggests that the pressure of demand must be, at least and permanently, twice as great as the dynamics of supply, to the point that this pressure represents a "Permanent Risk of Loss of Power" for the rulers. The positive and sustained evolution of the process of demand for democracy demonstrated by the Congolese from 2011 to 2019 is in this regard indicative of a democratic process, certainly not yet viable, but incontestably sustainable.