Explaining violence after recent elections in Ethiopia and Kenya

A comparison of recent contested elections in Kenya and Ethiopia points to divergences in the forms of political violence. While both countries saw the use of excessive force by members of the security services, Kenya experienced more widespread and deadly inter-ethnic violence than Ethiopia. This article considers these two countries in light of competing explanations for inter-ethnic violence, and concludes that variation in the extent of constitutional reforms is critical in influencing citizens’ responses to close electoral contests. In Kenya, there has been a lack of meaningful constitutional and institutional reform since the introduction of multiparty politics in the early 1990s. By contrast, Ethiopia has seen extensive and substantive constitutional reform in a similar period, but without a negotiated pact among political elites. In both cases, electoral procedures have heightened the stakes of politics and therefore led to significant and escalating political violence, but in unforeseen ways. The important electoral issue of regionalism or devolution in both countries is also briefly considered here. The violence surrounding the elections raises concerns about how to sustain citizen engagement with elections and other democratization activities when these fail to meet voter expectations over several electoral cycles.