Fighting your friends? A study of intra-party violence in sub-Saharan Africa

Systematic Measurement Error in Election Violence Data: Causes and Consequences

“…Burchard 2015;Daxecker 2014;Goldsmith 2015) as well as sub-national election violence research (e.g. Reeder and Bech Seeberg 2018;Buchard 2015;Ishiyama et al 2016;Linke 2013). We focus on two such datasets: ACLED (Raleigh et al 2010) and SCAD (Salehyan et al 2012) and concentrate particularly on their ability to capture subnational variation in election violence.…”

“…Neither ACLED nor SCAD were designed with the primary purpose of capturing election violence but both have been used for this purpose (e.g. Reeder and Bech Seeberg 2018;Buchard 2015;Daxecker 2014;Ishiyama et al 2016;Linke 2013). We focus on ACLED and SCAD because of their popularity and their comparability to M/ZEMS data.…”

“…For model specification, we emulate a recent study on constituency-level election violence in Africa by Reeder and Bech Seeberg (2018). 20 Like Reeder and Bech Seeberg, we control for urbanization, 21 night time lights (economic development), 22 competitiveness, 23 and democracy.…”

“…As outlined in the research design and shown in the descriptive statistics (Appendix Table A1, A2), these variables include MEMS pre-election violence and MEMS post-election violence as well as the equivalents for ZEMS, ACLED, SCAD, and ACLED/SCAD combined per country and electoral period. Recall that our model specification here emulates, a recent constituency-level study on election violence in Africa by Reeder and Bech Seeberg (2018). Following the analysis of Reeder and Bech Seeberg, the models include measures of urbanization, night lights, competition, and democracy.…”

“…Birch and Muchlinski 2018;von Borzyskowski 2014;Daxecker 2014;Fjelde and Höglund 2016a, Hafner-Burton et al 2014Kuhn 2015;Taylor et al 2017), while other work has been subnational (E.g. Reeder and Bech Seeberg 2018;Burchard 2015;Goldring and Wahman 2018;Dercon and Guitérrez-Romero 2012;Ishiyama et al 2016;Linke 2013;Weidmann and Callen 2013;Wilkinson 2004). Both sub-and cross-national 1 Election violence can be directed against people (candidates, voters, election officials, external supporters) or objects (election facilities, party offices, material) and can happen before or after election-day.…”