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.     

Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe

Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning of the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe stood at a crossroads. This period of imbalance and uncertainty affected the violent interaction in newly reformed electoral arenas with serious consequences for legitimizing democratic change. Despite the well-documented tension that existed in the region, the importance of violence in the electoral arena is rather neglected. The article approaches this gap as the first attempt to map electoral violence in a new typological environment where the process of transformation has affected political pluralism and the patterns of political contest. It argues that electoral violence is not a rare phenomenon in the region of post-Communist Europe and the dynamic varies on a great scale. Moreover, the article presents a picture of electoral violence occurring in different settings with potentially different contextual preconditions that need to be studied separately.     

新农村建设中的乡村民主选举探析——以湖南省S县T乡为例

建设社会主义新农村离不开村民自治的推进和完善.而民主选举是村民自治的首要标志,也是村民自治的基础.作者在文中以湖南省S县T乡为个案,通过深入调查,介绍该乡民主选举的现状,解析存在的问题及其产生的主要原因,进而提出改进与完善的对策建议.     

Algiers–Paris Round Trips: Diasporic Pathways of a Public Civil Dissidence

ABSTRACT

The fourth term official announcement of the Algerian President provoked in February 2014 a microscale protest movement called “Barakat” (Enough!) in Algiers. The state repression of the pacific protesters triggered a political mobilization among the Algerians living in France, particularly in Paris. Through an Algiers–Paris round-trip analysis, this article sheds light on the political involvement of the Algerian protesters in Paris. It explores the new Algerian diaspora process experience in the Arab civil uprising context, post-2011, and its protean outlines and contributions to reshape (or not) the frontiers of nation, citizenship, political participation, and public debate.     

The Presidential Election of 2008*

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain each has severe problems. McCain must take his distance from the very unpopular President Bush while keeping the support of the core Republican voters, but suffers from lack of rapport with the Fundamentalist Protestants and traditionalist Catholics. In foreign policy, he is more devoted to US global hegemony (in a world which stubbornly refuses it) than the incumbent. Senator Obama knows that this is a dangerous illusion but thinks that it is unwise to say so. He supports Israel in exaggerated terms and repeats the fabrications of the war party about Iran. Obama has the difficulty of being part black and entirely intellectual, and he needs the votes of the working class men and women who are very reserved about him. McCain seeks low taxes and less government expenditure and intervention, but tens of millions of economically hard‐pressed citizens are ready to return to the ethos and practices of the New Deal. Obama promises to revive the regulatory and redistributive role of government to help them, but his reluctance to criticise the arms budget may makes him seem unrealistic. Obama's vision of the United States puts the achievement of the American Revolution in the future whereas McCain thinks of the nation as already perfected. In many respects, we have a classical conflict between left and right.     

论抗战时期陕甘宁边区的民主选举及其启示

抗战时期,陕甘宁边区大力推进民主选举,推行普遍、平等、直接、无记名的选举原则,实行竞选和"三三制"选举政策。陕甘宁边区的民主选举,为我们今天完善选举制度、发展人民民主、建设社会主义和谐社会留下了宝贵的经验和启迪。     

佛州缠讼激--记2000年美国总统选举在佛州的法庭纷争

2000年美国总统选举是美国历史上拖得时间最长、斗争最激烈、双方最为世界瞩目的一次大选.佛州的"白宫之战"则是决定选战胜负的关键一役.更为世人称奇的是,共和党布什阵营和民主党阵营戈尔,破天荒地将总统宝座之争先后诉诸于法庭.围绕着选举应反映民意还是应遵守联邦以及各州的司法规定,从州法院缠讼到联邦法院,从基层法院打到最高法院,最后由联邦最高法院9位大法官以5票对4票的裁决,一槌定音粉碎了戈尔入主白宫的美梦,把布什送进了白宫.     

The impact of election outcome on internal political efficacy: The role of contextual factors

Many studies have investigated the consequences of election outcome for one of the important public attitudes, political efficacy. The effect of election outcome on external efficacy has been confirmed by most previous studies, whereas the effect on internal efficacy is not clear-cut. By reconceptualizing internal efficacy based on the social cognitive theory of self-efficacy, this study argues that there are two conditions for an election outcome’s impact on internal efficacy: the expected difficulty of winning and the level of involvement in the election. By analyzing panel survey data collected for three Japanese Lower House elections, this study shows that election outcome exerted an impact on internal efficacy if the following two conditions were simultaneously satisfied: (1) winners/losers perceived that the election was difficult/easy to win, and (2) voters were deeply involved in the election process.     

Don't air your dirty laundry: Party leadership contests and parliamentary election outcomes

Staging an open contest is a democratic method to choose a party leader, though its electoral consequences remain unclear. I argue that leadership contests are electorally detrimental to governing parties. Competitive contests signal intraparty policy and/or personality conflict to voters, which damages governing parties’ perceived unity as well as competence in the policy-making process. Thus, leadership contests undermine governing parties’ performances in parliamentary elections. Moreover, since voters evaluate governing parties’ record in office more than their rhetoric, unlike opposition parties, they cannot repair the image of incompetence/disunity by reshaping their rhetoric and/or policy direction. This implies that leadership contests damage governing parties’ electoral prospects more than they do to opposition parties’ electoral performances. Results from statistical testing with original data from 14 countries support my argument. In addition, these results are not endogenous to the contests’ timing; degree of competitiveness; leadership selection rules; whether or not the incumbent retains office; norms of contests; or how predecessors left office. These findings underscore the need to investigate the relationship between intraparty dynamics and election outcomes.     

Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

This article outlines a method for forecasting British general elections from national level vote shares at local elections. Although local elections are notionally ‘local’, the evidence suggests that they at least partly mirror national electoral fortunes. A simple general election vote share on local election vote share regression model that accounts for partisan differences and incumbency effects fits past data with reasonable accuracy. Based on the results of the 2013 and 2014 local elections, the model forecast a 56% probability of hung parliament, with a 78% probability of the Conservatives receiving the largest share of the vote.