Preventive action and conflict mitigation in Nigeria’s 2015 elections

Prior to the 2015 Nigerian general elections, there were concerns that the fierce political contest would lead to electoral violence in the country. However, the elections were conducted peacefully, with fewer disputes and election-related deaths than previous elections. This study accounts for the fall in the level of electoral violence in Nigeria and discusses the lessons that Nigeria’s experience presents. It argues that the avoidance of destructive electoral disputes in Nigeria was the result of preventive action taken by the country’s electoral commission, civil society groups, and development partners. The specific preventive actions taken include innovations in election administration aimed at enhancing electoral transparency and credibility, election security measures such as early warning and peace messaging, and preventive diplomacy urging the main candidates and the political elite to embrace peace. The key lesson that can be drawn from Nigeria’s experience is that a well thought out conflict prevention strategy should be an integral part of electoral governance, especially in countries with a high risk of electoral violence.     

Do Terrorist Attacks Increase Closer to Elections?

The shadow of violence that elections cast remains poorly understood. A key obstacle impeding cross-national empirical analysis of electoral violence has been the varied nature of such violence. To address this challenge, I examine terrorist attacks as one particular form of electoral violence. By tracking the incidence of terrorist violence relative to election dates over time and across countries using an original dataset for the period from 2000–2005, I find strong support for the hypothesis that terrorist violence increases as we move closer to an election date. In fact, terrorist violence approximates a normal distribution centered on the election date.     

Electoral Violence in Africa Revisited

This article addresses the still unsettled question of the incidence of violent election periods in Africa. It uses two new datasets, which report episodes of social conflict in the region for 1990–2011, and elections worldwide from 1960 to 2010. When combined, these data suggest that onsets of electoral violence peak around major election days in Africa as a whole, but with wide national variability in the volume of new episodes. Depending on the time span and type of social conflict, from one-quarter to three-quarters of the elections for national leadership have been without incident. The article also investigates the timing of electoral violence and the extent to which there is an experience curve effect, whereby subsequent elections have fewer onsets of social conflict. The data indicate that two-thirds to three-quarters of elections are free of onsets of social conflict, but that the proportion does not change much with experience. Overall, there appear to be reasonable grounds for optimism about peaceful elections in many African countries.     

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

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Second, low levels of competitiveness – typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence – increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes.     

Electoral violence prevention: what works?

Elections are in theory democratic means of resolving disputes and making collective decisions, yet too often force is employed to distort the electoral process. The post-Cold War increase in the number of electoral authoritarian and hybrid states has brought this problem into relief. In recent years the prevention of electoral violence has played an increasingly large role in the democratic assistance activities undertaken by international agencies, following increased awareness within the international community of the specific security challenges that elections entail. However, there has to date been little systematic evaluation of the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions so as to enable them to maintain the peace during the electoral period. This article assesses the effectiveness of two common types of international EVP activity. Using a new global dataset of EVP strategies between 2003 and 2015, this article finds evidence that capacity-building strategies reduce violence by non-state actors, whereas attitude-transforming strategies are associated with a reduction in violence by state actors and their allies. The findings are relevant both for understanding the dynamics of electoral violence, and also for policymakers and electoral assistance providers in the international community who have responsibility for the design of democratic assistance projects in states at risk of electoral violence.     

Who wins the most when everybody wins? Predicting candidate performance in an authoritarian election

ABSTRACT

What explains the variation in vote shares received by candidates in single-party authoritarian elections where everybody wins? The scholarly literature has often ignored institutional variations, treated all authoritarian elections as similar, and explained the variation of vote shares as a consequence of clientelism, coercion or electoral fraud. We employ a unique data set for Cuba’s 2013 National Assembly election to show an alternative answer: even in authoritarian regimes, institutional settings shape voters’ behaviour and candidates’ strategies. When the number of candidates on the ballot equals the number of parliamentary seats and yet voters can express some preference among multiple candidates, valence can become a predictor of candidate performance. Voters reward high-quality politicians, but not incumbents or Communist Party members, while candidates have no incentives to actively distinguish themselves and converge toward the general support of the single united slate.     

Electoral violence during party primaries in Kenya

ABSTRACT

Since the restoration of multi-party democracy in Kenya in 1991, elections have witnessed intra-party violence during the primaries for selecting parliamentary and civic seats candidates. This article addresses the question of why electoral violence occurs during party primaries in Kenya and argues that violence is an outcome of the organization of political parties, which has revolved around personalities identified with ethno-regional interests rather than institutionalism. The upshot has been the absence of party institutionalization to establish structures for recruitment of members and organization of primaries. Such organizational weaknesses have denied parties the capacity to match the intense competition for tickets of ethno-regional dominant parties that guarantees nominees to win seats in their strongholds. Intra-party violence has followed. The article submits that intra-party electoral violence in Kenya is a function of the politics of clientelism and ethnicity, both of which have severely hampered the institutionalization of political parties and their capacity to cope with the stiff competition for the tickets of ethno-regional dominant parties.     

Living in the Past or Living in the Future? Analyzing Parties’ Platform Change In Between Elections,The Netherlands 1997–2014

Do parties change their platform in anticipation of electoral losses? Or do parties respond to experienced losses at the previous election? These questions relate to two mechanisms to align public opinion with party platforms: (1) rational anticipation, and (2) electoral performance. While extant work empirically tested, and found support for, the latter mechanism, the effect of rational anticipation has not been put to an empirical test yet. We contribute to the literature on party platform change by theorizing and assessing how party performance motivates parties to change their platform in-between elections. We built a new and unique dataset of >20,000 press releases issued by 15 Dutch national political parties that were in parliament between 1997 and 2014. Utilizing automated text analysis (topic modeling) to measure parties’ platform change, we show that electoral defeat motivates party platform change in-between elections. In line with existing findings, we demonstrate that parties are backward-looking.     

Electoral Violence in Conflict-Ridden Societies: Concepts,Causes, and Consequences

What are the causes of electoral violence? And how does electoral violence influence conflict resolution and democracy? This article argues for a conceptualization of electoral violence as a specific sub-category of political violence, determined mainly by its timing and target. The enabling conditions and triggering factors can be identified in three main areas: 1) the nature of politics in conflict societies, 2) the nature of competitive elections, and 3) the incentives created by the electoral institutions. These clusters of factors are important for understanding electoral violence both between different societies and across elections in a specific country.     

“Peace propaganda”? the application of Chomsky’s propaganda model to the Daily Nation’s coverage of the 2013 Kenyan elections

This article uses the third and fourth filters of Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model, namely, official sources and flak, to examine how the Daily Nation, which is the largest circulating newspaper in Kenya, covered the 2013 Kenyan elections. In the run up to the elections, several institutions, among them the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) of Kenya and the Media Council of Kenya (MCK), organised several workshops with media owners and journalists in the name of “peace journalism” to avoid a repeat of the 2007/2008 post-election violence. Although such efforts paid off because there was no physical post-election violence, questions have been raised as to whether this extensive peace training translated to “peace propaganda” making journalists and the media in general engage in excessive self-censorship in the name of peaceful elections thereby neglecting their watchdog role. Using the findings from a qualitative content analysis of the Daily Nation as a case study and semi-structured interviews with civil society organisations as media monitors, it can be arguably observed that the Daily Nation avoided any “contentious electoral issues” for fear of flak and relied overly on the IEBC and other government agencies as official sources of critical electoral information.     

Procedural justice and perceived electoral integrity: the case of Korea's 2012 presidential election

Recently, there has been an increase in the number of scholars focusing on why voters around the world differ in their evaluations of electoral integrity. One group of scholars contends that perceived electoral integrity is determined by partisan status according to election results. Another group claims that individual perception of election quality is influenced by such political cues as institutional support for election management bodies. Although the two groups have developed this subject differently, they both underestimate the degree to which the election process affects electoral integrity. Based on the theory of procedural justice, this study argues that the more problems citizens see in the electoral process, the more negatively they tend to rate elections. An analysis of a public opinion survey conducted immediately after the December 2012 presidential election in South Korea provides credible evidence for our theoretical expectations and presents an important implication for elections of new democracies in a comparative perspective.     

Do Online Election Campaigns Win Votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” Election

Studies of Web use during elections have focused mainly on the content of Web sites and on the major factors driving parties' and candidates' adoption of the technology. Evaluations of the electoral impact of Web campaigns have been more limited. This article examines the nature and extent of Web use by voters and parties in the 2007 Australian federal election, focusing particularly on the consequences of Web 2.0 campaigning for candidate vote share. The findings show differing levels of commitment to older and newer e-campaigning technology across parties and their supporters and significant electoral advantages are associated with minor parties candidates using Web 2.0 campaign tools. The results confirm existing studies' findings about the impact of Web campaigns on contemporary elections, but that these effects are moderated by the type of Web tools used and party using them.     

The Gendered Face of Partisan Politics: Consequences of Facial Sex Typicality for Vote Choice

Facial cues are consequential for voters’ behavior at the polls. Yet the facial cues that are associated with vote choice remain under-examined. We predicted that vote choice judgments rely, in part, on the sex typicality of facial cues (i.e., the degree of facial masculinity and femininity) that vary as a function of candidate gender and partisan identification. Stimuli included image pairs of winners and runners-up in the elections for the 111th U.S. House of Representatives. In Study 1, we found that female Republican candidates who appeared relatively more feminine and male Republican candidates who looked relatively less masculine in their appearance were more likely to win their election. Democratic candidates’ electoral success was not related to their sex typicality. In Study 2, we found that relatively masculine-appearing Democrats and feminine-appearing Republicans were more likely to be selected in a hypothetical vote choice task. Implications for U.S. partisan politics are discussed.     

Measuring the quality of election administration

How do we distinguish between a ‘genuine’, ‘free and fair’, or ‘legitimate’ election and an election that is something less? In this article, we offer an answer to this vexing question: the Election Administration Systems Index (EASI). EASI is a practical, transparent, and sustainable tool for measuring the quality of elections in the developing world. The following pages describe the current limitations in measuring election quality, detail the EASI approach, and provide a comparative analysis of the results of its pilot implementation. EASI scores are drawn from a survey of experts on elections in the target country following a recent nationwide election. The analytical framework is comprised of three electoral dimensions: participation, competition, and integrity of the process. We also divide these dimensions temporally according to the electoral cycle: either pre-election, during the election, or post-election. The final product is a set of six primary scores displayed across dimension and time. By aggregating the survey data in this fashion, we provide for a nuanced assessment of an election by each dimension and across the cycle. As our pilot results demonstrate, EASI is a diagnostic tool for identifying electoral strengths and weaknesses and serves well for comparative assessments.     

The predicament of elections in war-torn societies

Why do elections held in the shadow of civil wars sometimes generate more violence in already war-torn societies, while in other circumstances they do not? This article develops a conceptual framework based on three clusters of factors to analyse the conflict-generating aspects of elections in war-torn societies: the key actors in the electoral processes; the institutions of elections; and the stakes of the elections. Two types of war-related elections are distinguished: elections held during an ongoing civil war, and elections held in the post-war period when peace is to be implemented. While different in many respects, the two contexts share critical characteristics through their association with the legacy of warfare. Several important implications emerge from the analysis. First, relating to militant and violent actors, incentive structures need to be altered by addressing both the opportunities and means of violence. Second, to prevent inducements for violent behaviour, institutional arrangements – including electoral commissions – have to be crafted with consideration given to local conflict dynamics and the history of violent conflict. Finally, the stakes of elections in war-shattered societies can be reduced through, for instance, constitutional pact-making and the oversight of external actors in electoral processes.     

Double standards: the verdicts of western election observers in sub-Saharan Africa

This article tests whether Western election observers apply a “double standard” to elections in sub-Saharan Africa. It demonstrates that they do: Western election observers were statistically less likely to allege that significant fraud had occurred in an election in sub-Saharan Africa, than an election of the same quality held elsewhere, throughout the period from 1991 to 2012. This discrepancy exists despite controls for other factors commonly thought to influence the verdicts of observers, such as the strategic interests of Western countries. Yet, there is variation over time. Between 1991 and 2001, the double standard is partly explained by “progress bias,” a tendency to tolerate flawed elections that improved on those held previously. From 2002 to 2012, observers’ application of a double standard is much harder to explain. In that period, the analysis points to several factors that discourage Western observers from alleging fraud, including the risk of triggering electoral violence and a desire to protect relationships with strategic partners. It also identifies factors that make allegations of electoral fraud more likely, including the precedent set by past allegations of fraud and – unexpectedly – higher levels of foreign aid. None of these factors, however, account for the regional discrepancy.     

Getting elections right? Measuring electoral integrity

Holding elections has become a global norm. Unfortunately, the integrity of elections varies strongly, ranging from “free and fair” elections with genuine contestation to “façade” elections marred by manipulation and fraud. Clearly, electoral integrity is a topic of increasing concern. Yet electoral integrity is notoriously difficult to measure, and hence taking stock of the available data is important. This article compares cross-national data sets measuring electoral integrity. The first part evaluates how the different data sets (a) conceptualize electoral integrity, (b) move from concepts to indicators, and (c) move from indicators to data. The second part analyses how different data sets code the same elections, seeking to explain the sources of disagreement about electoral integrity. The sample analysed comprises 746 elections in 95 third and fourth wave regimes from 1974 until 2009. I find that conceptual and measurement choices affect disagreement about election integrity, and also find that elections of lower integrity and post-conflict elections generate higher disagreement about election integrity. The article concludes with a discussion of results and suggestions for future research.     

Do multiparty elections improve human development in autocracies?

Improvements in human development under democratic institutions are often attributed to electoral contestation. We evaluate the effect of multiparty contestation on infant mortality in the authoritarian context. Contrary to what extant scholarship argues, we find no evidence that multiparty elections in authoritarian regimes reduce infant mortality. Specifically, we show that electoral autocracies do not produce better infant mortality outcomes compared to closed autocracies holding no multiparty elections. We also demonstrate a non-monotonic effect of electoral competition on infant mortality: Infant mortality increases in levels of electoral contestation common in electoral authoritarian regimes and decreases only at levels of contestation that are nearly exclusive to democracies. Finally, we show that increases in infant mortality in electoral authoritarian regimes operate partially through increased political violence and reduced state capacity.     

Elections,Election Outcomes,and Democracy in Southern Africa

Elections and election outcomes are widely used as a convenient short cut to measuring democracy. If this were correct, information on elections and election outcomes would be a time- and cost-saving means of identifying regime type. However, this article shows that the influential democracy measures of Beck et al., Ferree and Singh, Przeworski et al., and Vanhanen fail to adequately identify regime type when applied to ten countries in Southern Africa. For most countries, it is not possible to distinguish democracies from non-democracies on the basis of elections and election outcomes. Multi-party elections are not always free, fair, and democratic; dominant parties and dominant party systems are not necessarily undemocratic; large election victories are not by themselves proof of foul play; and not all authoritarian regimes maintain their rule through overwhelming parliamentary or electoral majorities.