Electoral violence and the legacy of authoritarian rule in Kenya and Zambia

Elections held outside of advanced, industrialized democracies can turn violent because elites use coercion to demobilize political opponents. The literature has established that closely contested elections are associated with more violence. I depart from this emphasis on competitiveness by highlighting how institutional biases in electoral systems, in particular uneven apportionment, affect incentives for violence. Malapportionment refers to a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population, violating the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. Drawing on recent work on malapportionment establishing that overrepresented districts are targeted with clientelist strategies, are more homogenous, and are biased in favor of district-level incumbent parties, I argue that overrepresented districts present fewer incentives for using violence. In contrast, elites in well-apportioned or underrepresented districts exert less control over electoral outcomes because such districts have more heterogenous voter preferences, raising incumbent and opposition demands to employ violence. I examine the effects of malapportionment on violence using constituency-level elections data and new, disaggregated, and geocoded event data on the incidence of election violence in India. Results from six parliamentary elections from 1991 to 2009 show that electoral violence is less prevalent in overrepresented constituencies, and that violence increases in equally apportioned and moderately underrepresented districts. The analysis establishes additional observable implications of the argument for district voter homogeneity and incumbent victory, accounts for confounders such as urbanization and state-level partisanship, and validates measures of election violence. The findings illustrate that institutional biases shape incentives for electoral violence.

Section: Election Violence As a Campaign Strategymentioning

confidence: 89%

Unequal votes, unequal violence: Malapportionment and election violence in India

Daxecker

2019

“…Patronage networks are thus important mid-level structures whose characteristics matter for elites considering the use of violence. Brosché, Fjelde & Höglund (2020), in a comparison of Kenya and Zambia, show how authoritarian regimes using more inclusionary governance strategies to maintain power, nurture dynamics that in multiparty elections reduce the risk of violence, while exclusionary regime strategies have the opposite effect. However, strong and exclusive institutions that deliver desired electoral results to incumbents without the need for them to resort to force may also be associated with less violence (Daxecker, 2020).…”

Section: Contributions Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A second theme concerns the formal and informal institutional foundations of electoral violence. The contributions explore the effect of authoritarian legacies (Brosché, Fjelde & Höglund, 2020), alternations in power (Ruiz-Rufino & Birch, 2020), party institutionalization (Fjelde, 2020), institutional biases (Daxecker, 2020), and informal networks of patronage (Berenschot, 2020). The strength and political inclusiveness of institutions are important mediators of the relationship between the instrumental aims of actors and their choice of political weapon.…”

Section: Contributions Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, pervasive informal institutions, where patronage politics and lack of rule of law become means of de facto exclusion of certain groups from state resources, encourage actors to resort to violent means (Berenschot, 2020; Brosché, Fjelde & Höglund, 2020). Berenschot (2020), drawing on ethnographic evidence and within-country variation in India and Indonesia, demonstrates the significance of the type of patronage network, where ethnicized networks serve to sustain divisive politics.…”

Section: Contributions Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Electoral violence: An introduction

Birch

Daxecker

Höglund

2020

Self Cite

Elections are held in nearly all countries in the contemporary world. Yet despite their aim of allowing for peaceful transfers of power, elections held outside of consolidated democracies are often accompanied by substantial violence. This special issue introduction article establishes electoral violence as a subtype of political violence with distinct analytical and empirical dynamics. We highlight how electoral violence is distinct from other types of organized violence, but also how it is qualitatively different from nonviolent electoral manipulation. The article then surveys what we have learned about the causes and consequences of electoral violence, identifies important research gaps in the literature, and proceeds to discuss the articles included in the special issue. The contributions advance research in four domains: the micro-level targeting and consequences of electoral violence, the institutional foundations of electoral violence, the conditions leading to high-stakes elections, and electoral violence in the context of other forms of organized violence. The individual articles are methodologically and geographically diverse, encompassing ethnography, survey vignette and list experiments and survey data, quantitative analyses of subnational and crossnational event data, and spanning Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

“… 10 See Figure XI in the Online appendix. Also see Brosché, Fjelde & Höglund’s (2020) account of the 1991 Zambian funding election in this issue. …”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-election violence and territorial control: Political dominance and subnational election violence in polarized African electoral systems

Wahman

Goldring

2020

Cross-national research on African electoral politics has argued that competition increases the prospects for pre-election violence. However, there is a dearth of systematic research on the effect of political competition on pre-election violence at the subnational level. We theorize that in African democracies characterized by competition at the national level but low subnational competitiveness (polarization), violence is often a manifestation of turf war and a tool to maintain and disrupt political territorial control. Consequently, contrary to expectations derived from the cross-national literature, pre-election violence is more likely in uncompetitive than competitive constituencies. Locally dominant as well as locally weak parties have incentives to perpetrate violence in uncompetitive constituencies. For locally dominant parties, violence is a tool to shrink the democratic space in their strongholds and maintain territorial control. For locally weak parties, violence can disturb the dominance of the opponent and protect their presence in hostile territory. We hypothesize that pre-election violence will be particularly common in opposition strongholds. In such locations, ruling parties can leverage their superior repressive resources to defend their ability to campaign, while the opposition can use their local capacity to reinforce the politics of territoriality. We test our hypotheses with original constituency-level election violence data from the 2016 Zambian elections. Data come from expert surveys of domestic election observers and represent a novel way of measuring low-level variations in election violence. Our analysis shows patterns of pre-election violence consistent with our theory on pre-election violence as a territorial tool.