Seeking to move beyond a literature that has generally focussed on the way in which ruling parties have sought to manipulate elections, Nic Cheeseman discusses the extent to which electoral practice has been both driven and constrained by popular expectations and demands. Nic Cheeseman is Professor of Democracy and International Development at the University of Birmingham. In addition to numerous book chapters, he is the author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, failures and the struggle for political reform and over twenty journal articles including “Rethinking the ‘presidentialism debate’: Conceptualizing coalitional politics in cross-regional perspective” (Democratization, 2014), which won the inaugural GIGA prize for the best article published in Comparative Area Studies.