Election in Mauritania. The role of the military Ojeda García, Raquel López Ruiz, Samara Mauritania might be most clearly defined as a militarized semi-presidential system in which the institution of military presidents is quite stable, while the institution of the prime minister is unstable and of lesser significance. Given the difficulty in separating the military from Mauritanian politics – described as a ‘restrictive and hegemonic pluralist authoritarian system’ (Szmolka 2011) – this chapter explores the role of the military in the Mauritanian political system through an analysis of its elections. In line with Jourde (2005), who highlighted the need to study the inner workings of the institutions in authoritarian regimes that appear to be democratic, this chapter provides an analysis of the military as decision-makers in elections (Marty 2002; N’Diaye 2006). 2024-12-13T12:36:04Z 2024-12-13T12:36:04Z 2023-03 book part Ojeda García, Raquel y López Ruiz, Samara. Election in Mauritania. The role of the military. Routledge Handbook on Elections in the Middle East and North Africa. eBook ISBN 9781003185628 9781003185628 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/98003 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ embargoed access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License Taylor and Francis