Who dissents? Self-efficacy and opposition action after state-sponsored election violence

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.

Section: Contributions Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contributions Of the Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral violence: An introduction

Birch

Daxecker

Höglund

2020

“… 3 Young (2020) in this issue suggests that the participatory consequences of election violence may be conditioned on psychological characteristics of the victim. …”

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.

“…This is because intimidation inherently signals a disregard for human rights and a preference for repression, whereas gift-giving is in isolation a beneficial act (Gonzalez-Ocantos, Kiewiet de Jonge & Nickerson, 2014). Exposure of violent tactics can trigger a loss of international legitimacy, sustained opposition protests (Hyde & Marinov, 2014; Young, 2020), and reductions in foreign aid (Wright, 2009; Donno, 2010). Similarly, at the domestic level accusations of vote-buying may prove unflattering and engender resentment (Weitz-Shapiro, 2012), but accusations of intimidation can be more damaging.…”

Section: Carrots Versus Sticksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carrots and sticks: Experimental evidence of vote-buying and voter intimidation in Guatemala

González-Ocantos

Jonge

Meléndez

et al. 2019

How do parties target intimidation and vote-buying during elections? Parties prefer the use of carrots over sticks because they are in the business of getting voters to like them and expect higher legitimacy costs if observers expose intimidation. However, their brokers sometimes choose intimidation because it is cheaper and possibly more effective than vote-buying. Specifically, we contend that brokers use intimidation when the cost of buying votes is prohibitively high; in interactions with voters among whom the commitment problem inherent to clientelistic transactions is difficult to overcome; and in contexts where the risk of being denounced for violence is lower. We probe our hypotheses about the different profile of voters targeted with vote-buying and intimidation using two list experiments included in an original survey conducted during the 2011 Guatemalan general elections. The list experiments were designed to overcome the social desirability bias associated with direct questions about illegal or stigmatized behaviors. Our quantitative analysis is supplemented by interviews with politicians from various parties. The analysis largely confirms our expectations about the diametrically opposed logics of vote-buying and intimidation targeting, and illuminates how both are key components of politics in a country with weak parties and high levels of violence.