Party matters: the institutional origins of competitive hegemony in Tanzania

Electoral authoritarianism has emerged as a primary mode of authoritarian rule in the post-Cold War era. It is also a notably heterogeneous phenomenon, in terms of both its impact upon incumbents and the quality of contestation. This article investigates a specific type of electoral authoritarian outcome, a competitive hegemony. In competitive hegemonies regimes are able to dominate elections by large vote margins, but with comparatively much lower levels of electoral fraud and coercion. Using a case study of Tanzania and its ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM), this article argues that distinct investments made under single-party rule into party institutionalization and the incorporation of subsistence-based peasants provided CCM with additional sources of elite cohesion, strong mobilization capacity, and therefore greater stability. The article shows how during multiparty elections elite defection has in fact been minimal, and voting patterns largely coincide with infrastructural investments made as part of Tanzania's socialist development programme, ujamaa. Moreover, while Tanzania's opposition parties have made important strides in recent years in terms of institutionalization, they are still precluded from competing effectively in large portions of the country where demand for new parties is low.     

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.     

When do electoral institutions trigger electoral misconduct?

Drawing on two complementary mechanisms, this article explores the question of whether electoral institutions and conditions of electoral competition create incentives to promote electoral misconduct in young or developing democracies. The first mechanism explains how majoritarian institutions like disproportional electoral systems are more likely to trigger electoral fraud than consensus electoral institutions like proportional representation. However, for this mechanism to be activated, the incumbent must feel effectively threatened by the opposition. To better understand the way this mechanism works, the electoral history of the country also needs to be taken into consideration. Democracies which have a historical record of running clean elections are less likely to experience fraud than countries with a history of electoral misconduct. I test these theoretical claims using a dataset that contains relevant information for 323 parliamentary elections in 59 new or developing democracies in the period between 1960 and 2006. The empirical analysis shows a strong and robust empirical support for the two mechanisms.     

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.     

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.     

Advancing without Attacking: The Strategic Game around the Use of Force

What is the nature of the strategic game that states play during crises? Extensive research examines the leading answer: coercive bargaining. States prevail by signaling resolve, establishing the credibility of their threats, and coercing their adversaries into backing down. However, instead of (or in addition to) traditional coercive bargaining, this article shows that states frequently play out a different game with its own set of rules and tactics. The article explores how states outmaneuver their adversaries: working around their red lines, taking gains by fait accompli and imposing pressure where it is possible to do so without quite crossing the line of unambiguously using force. Based on this premise, the article develops a theoretical framework for understanding strategic interaction during crises, referred to as advancing without attacking, and shows that it best explains the course of the Berlin Blockade Crisis of 1948–49 while also shedding light on other prominent crises.     

Understanding the Problem of Northeast India

The first wave of feminism in India was closely connected to electoral politics, while the second wave turned away from party politics. This resulted in a growing marginalization of feminist concerns from the public agenda. There is a strong relationship between movement success and electoral engagement. This article reviews the history of feminist interventions in electoral politics and demonstrates that early victories for women depended on their participation in party politics. I argue that the creation of the autonomous women's movement has had a diminishing effect on women's progress in recent years. A number of paths remain available to the women's movement to engage with political parties and political leaders. Staying outside the electoral arena has not served Indian feminism well.     

Does accountability matter? How electoral systems affect conflict initiation

Recent work on conflict suggests that electoral systems impact foreign policy-making in important ways; however, the discipline has reached different conclusions regarding how different types of electoral systems affect conflict initiation. In this study we contend that legislators are more accountable individually in candidate-centred electoral systems which impacts a state’s decision to initiate interstate conflict. We test our argument using a time-series cross-sectional analysis of 54 democracies from 1975 to 2001. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that candidate-centred electoral systems result in less conflict initiation than party-centric systems due to higher levels of individual accountability for legislative members.     

Electoral reform and public policy outcomes in Thailand: the politics of the 30-Baht health scheme

How do changes in electoral rules affect the nature of public policy outcomes? The current evidence supporting institutional theories that answer this question stems almost entirely from quantitative cross-country studies, the data of which contain very little within-unit variation. Indeed, while there are many country-level accounts of how changes in electoral rules affect such phenomena as the number of parties or voter turnout, there are few studies of how electoral reform affects public policy outcomes. This article contributes to this latter endeavor by providing a detailed analysis of electoral reform and the public policy process in Thailand through an examination of the 1997 electoral reforms. Specifically, the author examines four aspects of policy-making: policy formulation, policy platforms, policy content, and policy outcomes. The article finds that candidates in the pre-1997 era campaigned on broad, generic platforms; parties had no independent means of technical policy expertise; the government targeted health resources to narrow geographic areas; and health was underprovided in Thai society. Conversely, candidates in the post-1997 era relied more on a strong, detailed national health policy; parties created mechanisms to formulate health policy independently; the government allocated health resources broadly to the entire nation through the introduction of a universal health care system, and health outcomes improved. The author attributes these changes in the policy process to the 1997 electoral reform, which increased both constituency breadth (the proportion of the population to which politicians were accountable) and majoritarianism.     

Strategic ballot removal: an unexplored form of electoral manipulation in hybrid regimes

The literatures on electoral manipulation and rejected ballots have yet to engage one another in a compelling manner. This article provides the theoretical foundations for rejected ballots as electoral manipulation by exploring incidents of suspicious rejected ballot rates and practices around the world with a special focus on Zambia. Not only did the rate of rejected ballots in Zambia double between the 2015 and 2016 presidential elections, but a disproportionate increase was observed in president’s home province. Leveraging an original dataset, the article models a largely unnoticed form of electoral manipulation: the strategic rejection of opposition ballots by biased polling officials. Analysis reveals that more rejected ballots were associated with increased vote shares for the ruling party in the president’s home province, indicating probable electoral manipulation. Raising awareness around this difficult to detect, but likely pervasive, form of manipulation should help to improve electoral quality in hybrid regimes.     

Fuel to the Fire: Natural Disasters and the Duration of Civil Conflict

Do natural disasters prolong civil conflict? Or are disasters more likely to encourage peace as hostilities diminish when confronting shared hardship or as shifts in the balance of power between insurgents and the state hasten cessation? To address these questions, this study performs an event history analysis of disasters’ impact on the duration of 224 armed intrastate conflicts occurring in 86 states between 1946 and 2005. I contend that natural disasters increase conflict duration by decreasing the state’s capacity to suppress insurgency, while reinforcing insurgent groups’ ability to evade capture and avoid defeat. First, disasters’ economic impact coupled with state financial outlays for disaster relief and reconstruction, reduce resources available for counterinsurgency and nation building in conflict zones. Second, the military’s role in administering humanitarian assistance can reduce the availability of troops and military hardware for counterinsurgency, prompt temporary ceasefires with insurgents, or both. Third, natural disasters can cause infrastructural damages that disproportionately hinder the state’s capacity to execute counterinsurgency missions, thereby making insurgent forces more difficult to capture and overcome. The combination of these dynamics should encourage longer conflicts in states with higher incidence of disaster. Empirical evidence strongly supports this contention, indicating that states with greater disaster vulnerability fight longer wars.     

The transnational political engagements of refugees: Remittance sending practices amongst Somalis in Norway

This article aims to provide insight into the transnational political engagements of Somalis in Norway, and focuses mainly on their financial contributions. Such an aim is inspired by the increased interest in the transnational political engagements of diaspora groups, which has not yet been matched by sufficient empirical research on the topic. The Somali case is particularly interesting, considering the effective state collapse and ongoing civil war as well as the salience of local level security providing mechanisms. The first part of the article comprises an overview of different types of political transnational activities refugees engage in and the second part discusses the empirical study. Interestingly, though not surprisingly, the main political engagements of the Somali community in Norway do not take place through interaction with ‘the state’ or transitional state institutions; rather, they occur on a sub-national level, not only in the political domain but also through humanitarian initiatives.     

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.     

Election law violations as campaign effort: turnout in Japan's House of Councillors elections

Electoral fraud is a form of corrupt behaviour but it is also a form of electoral behaviour. Once the grosser forms of stuffing the ballot box have been eliminated, illegal campaigning often involves precisely the same activities as does legal campaigning. What makes it electoral fraud is ‘stepping over the line’, spending X?+?Y when the legal limit is X for example. In this study we analyse the determinants of legal and illegal campaign efforts as well as the impact of such efforts on voter turnout. We use the aggregate number of election law violations per district as a measure of Y, which is normally unobserved because it is illegal and thus unreported. We further distinguish between various types of election fraud such as vote-buying and canvassing and determine their effects on turnout. We find that electoral fraud is more common in close races and when there is intraparty competition. Similarly, illegal campaign effort in general mirrors legal efforts in increasing turnout although its effects depend on the type of violation in question.     

Who are the targets of familial electoral coercion? Evidence from Turkey

The unfettered expression of electoral choice is an important democratic right; however, in many contexts voters are pressured by others to cast their votes in certain ways. Electoral coercion is a topic that has received increased attention from researchers in recent years as part of the wave of research on electoral violence, yet there is little consensus in the literature as to who the targets of coercion are most likely to be. This article uses a list experiment embedded in a survey fielded following the Turkish general election of 2018 to identify the targets of coercive electoral practices within families and among close friends. The analysis reveals familial electoral coercion to be strongly conditioned by partisanship and disadvantaged demographic characteristics, but finds no evidence that women are more likely than men to be coerced.     

To Coerce or Reward? Theorizing Wedge Strategies in Alliance Politics

Wedge strategy, a policy of preventing or dividing an adversary coalition, has been attracting increasing scholarly attention. In particular, Timothy Crawford has articulated the concept and claims that reward-based strategies are more effective than coercive strategies that actually strengthen the ties between enemies. Although this sounds logical, history provides sufficient cases that contradict the claim. Why? To answer the question, I develop a theory of wedge strategy by utilizing the concept of reward power. I then argue that although countries seeking to divide adversary coalitions usually prefer reward-based strategies, they turn to coercive measures when a divider state perceives grave threats as a result of a target state's strong alignment with its primary enemy but does not have sufficient reward power to split the adversaries. I examine this theory through two case studies of us wedge strategies toward the Sino-Soviet alliance during the early Cold War period. This article addresses the specific puzzle of choices between reward and coercive wedge strategies and offers broader theoretical implications regarding the utility of the concept of reward power in international and alliance politics.     

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.     

Subverting autocracy: emancipative mass values in competitive authoritarian regimes

Competitive elections in authoritarian regimes are inherently ambiguous: do they extend regime persistence or, vice versa, operate as subversive events? This article tests Inglehart and Welzel's “emancipatory theory of democracy”, which has not been tested for competitive elections in autocracies: when emancipative values grow strong, autocratic power appears increasingly illegitimate in people's eyes, which motivates subversive mass actions against authoritarian rule. For electoral outcomes this suggestion implies, first, that authoritarian incumbents are more likely to suffer electoral defeat when emancipative values have become more widespread. Second, post-electoral protest against fraudulent elections is more likely when emancipative values have become more widespread. To test these hypotheses, we analyse 152 elections among 33 electoral authoritarian regimes over 21 years from 1990–2011. We find that emancipative values are indeed strongly conducive to incumbent defeat while their effect on post-electoral protest is conditional: it only occurs in elections won by the incumbent. These findings intertwine two separately developed literatures: one on authoritarian regime subversion and the other on emancipatory cultural change.     

Crafting competitive party systems: Electoral laws and the opposition in Africa

After the resurgence of democracy in the 1990s, as was the case after independence, dominant party systems are predominant in Africa. This has occurred irrespective of the particular electoral system used. Both scholars and practitioners have so far failed to appreciate the fact that not fragmentation but concentration of the party system is the main challenge and that a choice between proportional representation or a plurality electoral system will do little to change the fortunes of the majority party and the opposition. This article goes beyond the current debate by suggesting that opposition parties in Africa could be crafted through a minority premium, preferably in combination with a majority ceiling. Such electoral engineering would in the long‐term contribute to the emergence of a two‐party system, generally recognized as the environment most congenial to a strong parliamentary opposition. In the short‐term, adoption of a minority premium would increase competitiveness.     

The Role of State-Sponsored Militias in Genocide

This article explains how and why armed, non-state actors collaborate with states to inflict massive levels of violence. Regime type and state capacity interact to provide state elites a menu of repertoires for implementing violence, some emphasizing direct state action, others emphasizing cooperation and alliance between state and armed, non-state actors. Rather than struggling in vain to build strong states to eliminate armed non-state actors and establish a monopoly over the use of force, averting genocide might necessitate recruiting and strengthening the power of indigenous, armed non-state actors.