Stealing an Election: Violence or Fraud?

Abstract

Political actors often resort to electoral violence to gain an edge over their competitors even though violence is harder to hide than fraud and more likely to delegitimize elections as a result. Existing explanations tend to analyze violence in terms of the same factors as fraud, or to treat violence as a means of last resorts given its overtness. We introduce a novel explanation that does neither, arguing that political actors often use violence for the very reason that it is hard to hide. Its overtness, we argue, allows political actors to observe whether the agents they enlist to manipulate elections for them do so and reduces these agents’ likelihood of shirking in turn. We develop our argument through a formal model showing that electoral monitors, by exacerbating problems of moral hazard (shirking), can induce actors to increasingly turn to violence and use process tracing to examine the implications of this model through the example of Egypt.

Perversions of Accountability? Mayors, Reelection, and Criminal Groups

“…In such cases, at the highest degrees of criminal engagement, the measure presented here may indicate little engagement, despite killings occurring. Alternatively, criminal groups may actually encourage this kind of reporting to maximize its signaling and chilling effects to nearby areas, strategically using the violence for its visible purpose (Brancati and Penn 2022).…”