Institutions and Electoral Violence. Maurice René Dunaiski

Transcription

1 Institutions and Electoral Violence Maurice René Dunaiski March 24, 2015

2 Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) Sciences Po Paris Master in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action Academic Year 2014/2015 Supervised by Dr Bruno Cautrès The copyright of this Master s thesis remains the property of its author. No part of the content may be reproduced, published, distributed, copied or stored for public or private use without written permission of the author. All authorization requests should be sent to vanessa.scherrer@sciencespo.fr and mauricedunaiski@gmail.com.

3 Abstract Politically motivated violence and large-scale human rights abuses are a common feature of electoral contests in the developing world. But why are some countries more likely to experience electoral violence than others? Using a panel dataset on election-related social conflict in Africa since 1990, this paper shows that institutions matter in explaining a country s risk of electoral violence. Going beyond previous quantitative research on electoral violence, this paper demonstrates that institutional factors such as the electoral system, decentralization, the separation of powers, and state capacity all have an important impact on the likelihood of electoral violence. My findings indicate that, all else being equal, centralized states with majoritarian electoral systems, semi-parliamentary regimes and weak state capacity are most at risk of experiencing electoral violence. Importantly, this paper also provides evidence suggesting that the effect of institutions on electoral violence differs between the pre- and the post-election period as well as between pro- and anti-government perpetrators.

4 Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Literature Review Armed conflict Repression Electoral violence Theoretical Framework What are institutions? How can institutions shape behaviour? Institutions and electoral violence Data Measuring electoral violence Measuring institutions Controls Analysis Pre-election violence Post-election violence Conclusion 51 Bibliography 53 Appendix 62 1

5 Chapter 1 Introduction In the immediate aftermath of the 2007 general elections in Kenya more than 1000 people were killed and roughly people were internally displaced as the result of violence between government loyalists and opposition supporters (International Crisis Group, 2008). Even though the magnitude of the killings and the scale of the destruction were unprecedented, the phenomenon of electoral violence is certainly not unique to the case of Kenya. Recent elections in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Côte d Ivoire, Egypt, Nigeria, Guatemala and Thailand have also been marred by politically motivated violence and grave human rights abuses. Why did these elections turn violent, when so many other elections in recent years remained peaceful? Despite the enormous destructive potential of electoral violence, the question of what makes some elections more violent than others has been largely ignored in the political science literature. We know relatively little about the frequency and geographical distribution of electoral violence across countries. We also do not have a lot of reliable information about who is primarily responsible for electoral violence - the state, or opposition actors? Furthermore, we have only a very limited understanding of the situational and structural factors that determine the likelihood of electoral violence in a given country. Only recently, political scientists have started to examine the phenomenon of electoral violence and begun to offer explanations as to why some elections turn violent. While most of this work has taken the form of qualitative case studies, in the last few years scholars have produced a number of pioneering articles and working papers that systematically examine electoral violence from a quantitative perspective (see Straus and Taylor, 2009; Hafner-Burton et al., 2010; Daxecker, 2012; Linebarger and Salehyan, 2012; Fjelde and Höglund, 2015). This development is undoubtedly due to the recent proliferation of high-quality data sources on low-level conflict events, which now allow researchers to examine electoral violence from a quantitative, cross-national perspective (see Raleigh et al., 2010; Salehyan et al., 2012; Sundberg and Melander, 2013). Previous explanations of electoral violence have mostly focused on situational factors such as the closeness of the electoral race, the extent of electoral fraud, or the presence of international election monitors (see Wilkinson, 2006; Collier and Vicente, 2008; Daxecker, 2014; Hafner-Burton et al., 2014). However, the potential impact of country-level institutions on the likelihood of electoral violence has been almost completely ignored 1. This gap in the literature on electoral violence is surprising, given that the more developed literature on conflict management and institutional engineering provides empirical evidence suggesting that institutions can have an important impact on the likelihood of civil war onset (e.g. Brancati, 2006; Schneider and Wiesehomeier, 2008; Hendrix, 2010; Bogaards, 2013), the level of state repression (e.g. Cingranelli and Filippov, 2010) and the likelihood of electoral fraud (e.g. Birch, 2007; Hicken, 2007). This paper aims to fill the above-mentioned gap in the quantitative literature on electoral violence. It shows that institutions matter in explaining why some countries are more prone to election-related violence than others, and that accordingly any explanation of electoral violence needs to take countrylevel institutional factors into account. I use negative binomial regression models and a panel dataset 1 For two important exceptions, see Opitz et al. (2013) and Fjelde and Höglund (2015). 2

6 on election-related social conflict events in Africa between 1990 and 2010 to uncover the institutional drivers of electoral violence. I focus on electoral violence in Africa for a number of theoretical and methodological reasons (see Chapter 4). My statistical analysis shows that a country s electoral system, its state structure, the separation of powers, as well as its state capacity all have an important impact on the risk of electoral violence. My results suggest that, all else being equal, unitary states with majoritarian electoral systems, semi-parliamentary regimes and weak state capacity are most at risk of experiencing electoral violence. Using interactions, I also show that a country s ethnic composition has an important mediating impact on the violence-inducing effect of majoritarian electoral systems. This paper advances the existing literature on electoral violence in several ways. To begin with, it represents the first serious attempt to systematically examine the impact of a whole range of institutional factors on the likelihood of electoral violence. Previous studies on the relationship between institutions and electoral violence have for the most part taken a qualitative, case-study approach (see Höglund, 2009; Opitz et al., 2013), or have narrowly focused on one specific institutional factor (see Hafner-Burton et al., 2014; Fjelde and Höglund, 2015). Secondly, this paper is the first to systematically examine how the impact of institutions on electoral violence differs between the preand the post-election period. Previous quantitative studies on electoral violence have either failed to adequately distinguish between the two periods (see Fjelde and Höglund, 2015), or have only focused on one of the two (see Daxecker, 2012; Borzyskowski, 2013; Daxecker, 2014; Hyde and Marinov, 2014). This is unfortunate, given the different dynamics of violence at play during the pre- and post-election periods. Lastly, most of the previous empirical literature has failed to distinguish between violence perpetrated by incumbents and violence perpetrated by challengers or other non-state actors (for exceptions see Straus and Taylor, 2009; Daxecker, 2014; Fjelde and Höglund, 2015). However, as this paper shows, the two competing electoral camps can have divergent incentives to resort to electoral violence depending on a number of institutional constraints. The paper is structured as follows. To begin with, Chapter 2 develops a working definition of electoral violence and provides a comprehensive overview of the relevant literature. The literature review also links this new field of research with the more established literature on armed conflict (see Section 2.1) and state repression (see Section 2.2). In Chapter 3 I then develop the theoretical framework that will inform my empirical analysis. In particular, I develop a number of hypotheses about the relationship between specific country-level institutional factors and the likelihood of electoral violence. Thereafter, Chapter 4 presents my research design and the panel dataset in more detail. In Chapter 5 I discuss the main findings from my regression analysis. Overall, I find that institutional factors are important determinants of both pre- and post-election violence. Importantly, my findings also suggest that the impact of individual institutional factors can differ between the two periods and in some cases also depend on the perpetrator. Lastly, Chapter 6 concludes my analysis and presents possible avenues for future research on the subject of electoral violence. 3

7 Chapter 2 Literature Review One of the defining features of democratic regimes is that they hold regular and competitive elections (Dahl, 1973). However, it is clear that simply holding elections does not make a country democratic. Since the end of the Cold War it has become increasingly common to see regular elections taking place in countries that lack even the most basic attributes of liberal democracies, such as freedom of expression or freedom of association (Diamond, 2002). In fact, elections have become so common that only ten countries failed to hold some form of direct national election between 2000 and 2006 (Hyde and Marinov, 2009). Scholars have acknowledged the increasing variety of regime types that hold regular elections by creating typologies that distinguish mature democracies from hybrid, competitive authoritarian, electoral authoritarian and other types of autocratic regimes (see e.g. Diamond, 2002; Levitsky and Way, 2002; Schedler, 2002; Gandhi and Lust-Okar, 2009). Elections in these less-thandemocratic countries lead to what Gates et al. (2006) call institutionally inconsistent regimes that exhibit traits of both democracies and autocracies. In such contexts, elections are primarily used to placate external constituents such as foreign donors or pressure groups and their outcomes are often manipulated through violence, intimidation and fraud (Linebarger and Salehyan, 2012). It is therefore understandable that scholars and practitioners have started to raise questions about the potentially negative impacts of premature democratization efforts and the role of violence in electoral competition (see e.g. Collier, 2011; UNDP, 2011). In the following chapter I provide an overview of the academic literature that addresses the connection between elections and violence. To begin with, I review the relatively well-developed fields of research that examine the link between elections and two more prominent forms of political violence: armed conflict and repression. Thereafter I turn to the small but burgeoning field of research that deals specifically with the phenomenon of electoral violence. I show that the few existing quantitative studies on electoral violence have not yet adequately addressed the question of how institutional factors such as the electoral system, decentralization or state capacity shape a country s predisposition to experience electoral violence. 2.1 Armed conflict The pacifying effect of democracy has found substantial empirical support in the literature on intraand inter-state armed conflict. A large number of scholars have shown that democratic regimes are more peaceful in international affairs than their authoritarian counterparts (Doyle, 1986; Lake, 1992; Schultz, 1998). The impact of democratic governance on the likelihood of internal armed conflict is somewhat less clear and scholars have found both linear and inverted U-shaped relationships (see Hegre et al., 2001; Hegre and Sambanis, 2006; Schneider and Wiesehomeier, 2008; Vreeland, 2008). Nevertheless, the negative association between democracy and war, also known as the democratic peace, is one of the most robust and consistent findings in the literature on armed conflict (see e.g. Dafoe et al., 2013; Hegre, 2014). However, the picture becomes much less clear-cut when we look at the relationship between elections - only one component of full-fledged democracies - and the occurrence of 4

8 armed conflict. The main concern of scholars studying this relationship is that the premature holding of elections in countries emerging from civil war and authoritarianism could trigger renewed violence by further polarizing deeply divided communities (see Collier, 2011). This concern has resulted in a large number of papers that investigate the impact of elections on the likelihood of armed conflict. There is considerable debate about the advantages of early versus delayed elections in post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. Representing the more optimistic school of thought, Cheibub et al. (2012) argue that elections in unconsolidated democracies do not lead to more conflict. In fact, their quantitative analysis suggests that elections can have a pacifying effect on divided societies. In their recent paper they examine the causal relationship between multiparty elections in Africa and the initiation of civil wars in the period Their data provides no support for the competing hypothesis that elections increase the probability of a civil war onset. The optimistic view of Cheibub et al. is shared by a number of other scholars, who stress that repeated elections can contribute to successful transitions from civil war and authoritarianism to stable democratic governance (see e.g. Wantchekon and Neeman, 2002; Birnir, 2007; Lindberg, 2008). In contrast, a number of scholars have provided empirical evidence showing that premature democratization efforts can indeed precipitate civil war in post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies. For example, Collier has argued that elections in dangerous places - i.e. countries with weak institutions and deep social cleavages - often act as a trigger of civil war (Collier et al., 2008; Collier, 2011). Similarly, several recent papers analyze crossnational datasets and claim to establish a negative causal impact of elections on civil war initiation (Hegre et al., 2001; Mansfield and Snyder, 2009; Cederman et al., 2010a; Flores and Nooruddin, 2012; Cederman et al., 2013). These papers suggest that international democracy promotion efforts can be counterproductive in countries that do not yet exhibit the institutional and societal prerequisites for peaceful democratic competition. Cheibub et al. criticize this more pessimistic school of thought for not adequately addressing endogeneity issues. They maintain that multiparty elections in democratizing, non-institutionalized authoritarian regimes are observed precisely when the leader already faces a significant threat of being removed by force: they are held when a civil war is already a real possibility and elections are nothing but an attempt to avoid war. (Cheibub et al., 2012; p.8). According to Cheibub et al. it is this dynamic, rather than electoral competition per se, that seems to be the driving factors behind the more pessimistic findings in the literature. They show that if one takes the issue of endogeneity seriously, the impact of elections on armed conflict turns out to be much more benign. In short, while scholars generally agree that democracy decreases the likelihood of armed conflict, there is still no consensus on whether elections can be said to have the same effect. However, recent scholarship has tried to bridge the gap between the optimistic and pessimistic schools of thought by suggesting that the perils and promises of elections may depend on the nature and constellation of the groups competing for power (see Cederman et al., 2013). Such an approach will allow future research to further disaggregate and unpack the concept of electoral competition and hopefully offer valuable new insights into the relationship between elections and armed conflict. One of the major shortcomings of the quantitative literature on the elections-conflict nexus is its reliance on country-year time-series datasets. As a consequence of this approach, scholars cannot analyze the violent dynamics at play during the electoral process. In other words, they cannot account for differences between pre- and post-election violence and they can only examine the long-term consequences of elections. In addition, their data usually fails to capture any violence associated with elections that does not reach the very high threshold of armed conflict 2 (Linebarger and Salehyan, 2012). Yet, for conflict researchers it is important to understand election-related violence short of armed conflict, given that in many cases such low-level violence can serve as a training ground for warfare (Höglund, 2010; p.4). In this respect, one question that future research will need to address is whether the spread of elections to less-than-democratic countries has inadvertently fueled low-level conflicts that do not immediately reach the threshold of armed conflict (see Goldsmith, 2014). 2 One of the most frequently used datasets, the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, defines armed conflict as a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths (see Gleditsch et al., 2002; Themner and Wallensteen, 2013). 5

9 2.2 Repression The literature on state repression 3 represents another well-developed field of research that examines the link between elections and political violence. It is widely accepted that democracy and human rights go together. Indeed, there is ample empirical evidence showing that stable democracies are much less likely to violate basic human rights than any other regime type (Poe and Tate, 1994; Poe et al., 1999; Davenport and Armstrong, 2004; Bueno De Mesquita et al., 2005; Davenport, 2007; Young, 2009). In contrast, the relationship between elections and the abuse of human rights is much less clear-cut. Existing quantitative studies have largely focused on examining whether state repression increases or decreases during election years. However, these studies have come to conflicting conclusions about the impact of elections on state repressive behaviour. Representing the more optimistic camp, Davenport (1997) finds that the level of repression in authoritarian regimes decreases significantly during years in which elections are held. He argues that this is due to the fact that authoritarian regimes want to legitimize themselves and improve their image during election years. In a follow-up study he also finds that national elections in both democracies and autocracies tend to reduce censorship of the media and state restrictions placed upon individuals and groups (Davenport, 1998). A number of scholars have since challenged Davenport s more optimistic findings. For example, Richards (1999) finds that the impact of national elections on levels of human rights abuse is not statistically significant when controlling for population size, economic development, armed conflict and the extent of suffrage. Similarly, Conrad and Moore (2010) argue that elections have little effect on the likelihood that states terminate the use of torture when they are faced with violent dissent or civil war. More recent studies have also tried to further disaggregate the concept of elections. They find that the effect of elections on levels of state repression depends on the type of electoral competition and the incentives created by different electoral rules. For example, Richards and Gelleny (2007) argue that executive elections increase the level of human rights abuse, while legislative elections tend to have the opposite effect. In a similar vein, Cingranelli and Filippov (2010) show that low-magnitude proportional representation districts and candidate-centered voting rules are the two factors that can be said to significantly decrease the level of state repression in democratic countries. In short, while there is widespread agreement that democracies are less likely to resort to repression than any other regime types, there is still no consensus on whether elections have the same potential to reduce human rights violations. As with the literature on armed conflict, one important shortcoming of the quantitative literature on state repression is that it relies almost exclusively on aggregate annual measures of human rights abuse 4. The problem with such highly aggregated measures is that the recorded abuse may or may not have been related to elections. Furthermore, the country-year format makes it impossible for researchers to distinguish between pre- and post-election violence (Hafner-Burton et al., 2014). 2.3 Electoral violence What makes electoral violence distinct from other forms of political violence such as armed conflict or state repression? What does previous academic work say about the causes and consequences of electoral violence? What are the knowledge gaps in this field of research? In the following section I provide answers to these three questions. I begin with developing a working definition of electoral violence, before reviewing the literature on this subject and highlighting its main shortcomings. 3 For the purpose of this paper I define state repression as the actual or threatened use of physical sanctions against an individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the state, for the purpose of imposing a cost on the target as well as deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions (Davenport, 2007; p.2) The violation of physical integrity rights (i.e. torture, disappearance, political imprisonment and extrajudicial killing) is the category of human rights abuse that is most frequently used as the dependent variable in the quantitative literature on state repression (Cingranelli and Filippov, 2010). 4 The two most frequently used datasets on human rights violations are the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project (Cingranelli and Richards, 2010) and the Political Terror Scale (PTS) (Gibney et al., 2014). Both datasets use country-years as their unit of analysis. However, while CIRI measures human rights practices of governments, PTS measures human rights conditions in countries (Cingranelli and Filippov, 2010). 6

10 What is electoral violence? In line with Höglund (2009), I suggest that it is primarily the motive and timing that set electoral violence apart from other forms of political violence such as armed conflict, state repression or terrorism. Even though electoral violence often occurs in countries that are experiencing other forms of violent conflict, it is the motive and timing that make it an analytically distinct phenomenon and a form of violence with unique causes and consequences (see Höglund, 2009; p.415). The general motive behind electoral violence is to influence the electoral process. This characterization is in line with most of the conceptual literature on electoral violence, which stresses the instrumental or goal-oriented nature of such violence (see e.g. Laakso, 2007; Sisk, 2008; Höglund, 2009; Collier and Vicente, 2012). The more specific motives of actors engaging in electoral violence usually take one of the following four forms. Firstly, actors might use violence in opposition to elections of any sorts (e.g. the Taliban in post-2001 Afghanistan). Secondly, actors might violently oppose only specific electoral contests, but not democracy per se. Thirdly, actors might accept electoral competition, but resort to violence as a means to influence the election results in their favour 5. Lastly, actors might use violence in the aftermath of elections to overturn or defend the proclaimed results (Höglund, 2009). In order to draw a conceptual distinction between electoral violence and armed conflict, Fjelde and Höglund (2015; p.2) argue that electoral violence is employed alongside other constitutional and non-constitutional strategies for retaining power, whereas the outbreak of armed conflict represents an exit strategy from the domain of regular political competition. Unfortunately, this distinction fails to capture the first, second and fourth forms of electoral violence identified above, given that they can clearly also represent exit strategies from the domain of regular political competition. Hence, I suggest that a second dimension (i.e. timing ) needs to be taken into account if we want to conceptually separate electoral violence from other forms of political violence. With regard to timing, electoral violence takes place during the electoral process 6 and generally falls into one of the following three periods: the pre-election period, the election day(s), or the postelection period. In this respect it is important to note that the motives behind the use of violence are different in the three periods. While violence in the the pre-election phase and during the election day(s) is generally aimed at increasing the vote share of the perpetrator or disrupting the electoral process altogether, violence in the post-election period tends to be aimed at challenging or defending the official results (Hafner-Burton et al., 2014). This conceptual distinction between pre- and postelection violence is also highlighted by Daxecker (2014), who notes that the underlying causes of electoral violence may differ depending on when it occurs. She suggests that pre-election violence and violence during the election day(s) should be conceptualized as strategic manipulation or a form of election fraud, whereas post-election violence follows a different logic and should be conceptualized as a response to outcomes, particularly if fraud occurred (Daxecker, 2014; p.233). With these conceptual issues in mind, we can now define electoral violence as the use or threat of violence aimed at influencing an impeding electoral contest or an announced electoral result. This definition of electoral violence encompasses direct physical violence, harassment and the destruction of property (e.g. polling stations) by state actors as well as non-state actors, with the purpose of influencing the electoral process, either in the pre-election period, during polling day, or in the post-election period (for similar definitions see Straus and Taylor, 2009; Opitz et al., 2013; Goldsmith, 2014). Data on electoral violence The phenomenon of electoral violence is much more frequent than is commonly thought. For example, in a first systematic attempt to map the prevalence of electoral violence in Africa, Straus and Taylor (2009) find that around 60 percent of all national elections since 1990 have been accompanied by some 5 This category can also include the use of violence to change the demography of a constituency and the use of violence to discipline would-be defectors from a winning coalition (see Straus and Taylor, 2009; p.19). 6 While it is impossible to draw clear temporal boundaries around the concept of electoral process, it has been suggested that this process typically begins with events such as voter and party registrations or campaign initiations, and that it usually ends with the inauguration of the newly elected officials (Höglund, 2009). 7

11 form of violent intimidation, even though only 20 percent experienced large-scale civilian casualties. Another recent study finds that roughly one fifth of all elections worldwide are marred by electoral violence and that this phenomenon is not confined to Sub-Saharan Africa, but affects nearly all world regions 7 (Norris, 2012). Other studies have pointed out that in some countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, the Philippines, India, or Thailand the electoral process is routinely accompanied by massive, organized campaigns of violence and intimidation (see e.g. UNDP, 2011; Hafner-Burton et al., 2014; Daxecker, 2014). Yet, despite the high frequency and prevalence of electoral violence across the world, this phenomenon has only recently started to be examined systematically. The question of what makes some elections more violent than others has been largely ignored in the empirical political science literature. This stands in stark contrast to the numerous articles reviewed above, which have examined the question of whether elections can trigger armed conflicts and state repression. A number of early studies deal with theoretical and conceptual issues related to electoral violence (see e.g. Rapoport and Weinberg, 2000; Fisher, 2002; Höglund, 2009). In addition, several recent case studies and comparative papers examine electoral violence from a qualitative angle 8 (see e.g. Guelke, 2000; Pausewang et al., 2003; Wilkinson, 2006; Laakso, 2007; Bratton, 2008; Collier and Vicente, 2012). These papers provide detailed information about the micro-level dynamics of electoral violence and they develop valuable hypotheses about the causes and consequences of electoral violence. However, the lack of cross-national data on electoral violence has largely prevented scholars from studying the issue more systematically and has hampered efforts to test the theories developed in the qualitative literature (Linebarger and Salehyan, 2012). Until recently, very little data on political violence were available in cross-national format, aside from the commonly used country-year datasets on armed conflict 9 and state repression 10. The few crossnational datasets that included forms of low-level violence such as the Cross-National Time-Series Archive (Banks, 2011), typically lacked sufficient detail to disaggregate violent events by issue-type and to attribute them to electoral contests (Linebarger and Salehyan, 2012). However, the last couple of years have witnessed an explosion of micro-level data-gathering efforts that will allow researchers to systematically analyze the phenomenon of electoral violence without needing to rely on the restrictive country-year format. These include the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) (Salehyan et al., 2012), the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) (Raleigh et al., 2010), and the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (Sundberg and Melander, 2013) 11. In addition, the relatively new dataset on National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA), created by Hyde and Marinov (2012b), now allows researchers to study patterns of electoral violence using election rounds instead of election years as the unit of analysis. How has recent scholarship utilized this new wealth of data on electoral violence? In the following sub-sections I provide an overview of the burgeoning field of research that examines the causes and consequences of electoral violence. In keeping with the important conceptual distinction between pre- and post-election violence identified earlier, I begin with an examination of the existing literature on the causes and consequences of pre-election violence, before turning to the related but distinct literature on post-election violence. 7 The main exceptions are Western Europe and North America, even though some sporadic electoral violence can be observed in these regions. For example, the Basque separatist organization ETA has repeatedly used violence to disrupt elections in Spain (Norris, 2012; p.13). 8 Two recent case studies of electoral violence in Kenya and Burundi also examine the phenomenon from a quantitative perspective (see Dercon and Gutierrez-Romero, 2012; Colombo et al., 2014). However, due to the case study format, their empirical findings cannot be readily generalized to different contexts. 9 The two most commonly used cross-national datasets on armed conflict are the Correlates of War (Singer and Small, 1994) and the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset (Gleditsch et al., 2002). 10 see Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project (Cingranelli and Richards, 2010) and the Political Terror Scale (PTS) (Gibney et al., 2014). 11 So far the geographic scope of these disaggregated, event-based datasets is limited to countries in Africa. However, ACLED researchers have started gathering data on some non-african countries (see and Ursula Daxecker at the University of Amsterdam has initiated an events-based dataset on electoral violence with global coverage for the years (personal correspondence). As far as I am aware, there are also three smaller datasets on electoral violence in Africa that are unfortunately not publicly available (see Lindberg, 2008; Straus and Taylor, 2009; Arriola and Johnson, 2012). 8

12 Literature on pre-election violence The literature on the causes and consequences of pre-election violence can be roughly divided into two groups. The first group focuses on the incentives and motives of political actors who use violence strategically in order to manipulate the electoral process in their favour 12 (Chaturvedi, 2005; Wilkinson, 2006; Collier and Vicente, 2012). The second group focuses on structural or enabling factors that make some countries more susceptible to electoral violence than others (Höglund, 2009; Straus and Taylor, 2009; Linebarger and Salehyan, 2012). Only recently have scholars tried to explain pre-election violence by integrating the two approaches (see Hafner-Burton et al., 2014; Fjelde and Höglund, 2015). Chaturvedi (2005) uses formal models and journalistic evidence to develop an agent-centered theory of pre-election violence. He treats pre-election violence as a form of electoral manipulation that can be substituted with ideological exhortation (Chaturvedi, 2005; p.189). He argues that, in an electoral contest between two parties, the potential for pre-election violence will decrease as the fraction of undecided voters goes up. In other words, very close electoral contests do not bode well for stability. He also suggests that incumbent parties will be more likely to resort to violent manipulation of the electoral contest given their access to state resources. Unfortunately, Chaturvedi provides no systematic empirical evidence to support his hypotheses. In his seminal study on ethnic riots and elections in India, Wilkinson (2006) also treats pre-election violence as a form of strategic manipulation that can be used by politicians to increase their vote share in close electoral contests. He provides a detailed subnational analysis of electoral violence in India and argues that politicians incite or suppress ethnic violence depending on whether the support of ethnic minorities is necessary for their electoral success. Even though Wilkinson does provide some statistical evidence to support his claims, the focus on regional elections in India means that his findings cannot be readily generalized to other countries. Collier and Vicente (2012) develop a theory of preelection violence that is similar to the one put forward by Chaturvedi (2005) and Wilkinson (2006). They also treat electoral violence as a form of strategic manipulation used by politicians and political parties to shape the electoral process in their favour. However, in their formal models, violence can be substituted with both vote-buying and ballot fraud as tactics to increase vote shares. They argue that electoral violence is most likely when unpopular incumbents fear losing their grip on power as the result of elections. Similarly, electoral violence is likely to be the dominant strategy of weak challengers that want to increase their vote share. In contrast, strong incumbents facing localized competition are more likely to resort to the non-violent manipulation strategies of vote-buying and ballot fraud. Again, the main shortcoming of Collier and Vicente s paper is that they cannot systematically test their theory of pre-election violence. The lack of cross-national data on vote-buying and ballot fraud means that they can only refer to illustrative case studies to back up their theoretical arguments (see Collier and Vicente, 2012; p.135ff). In her conceptual analysis of electoral violence, Höglund (2009) highlights three structural factors that can explain why elections in some countries are more violent than in others. To begin with, she suggests that patrimonialism - i.e. a system of governance based on patron-client networks - fosters electoral violence 13. While this hypothesis sounds plausible, the relationship between patrimonialism and electoral violence does not readily lend itself to empirical investigation. Besides problems related to the operationalization of patrimonialism, it is also likely that the phenomenon is endogenous to political violence. Indeed, Höglund herself suggests that politics of patronage tends to fester in countries with high levels of insecurity (Höglund, 2009; p.420). Secondly, she suggests that political competition in itself can foster electoral violence, given that it exacerbates pre-existing social cleavages. In line with arguments previously put forward by Chaturvedi (2005) and Wilkinson (2006), she maintains that politicians in close races have strong incentives to foment pre-election violence (Höglund, 2009; p.421). Lastly, Höglund argues that the design of the electoral system will impact a country s likelihood to experience electoral violence. Drawing on previous literature in the field of electoral system design and conflict management (e.g. Reilly et al., 1999; Reilly, 2002b; Norris, 2004), she predicts that 12 Some of this research provides robust empirical evidence showing that electoral violence can indeed shape voter turnout (and precipitate opposition boycotts) in favour of the perpetrator (Bratton, 2008; Collier and Vicente, 2008; Hafner-Burton et al., 2012). 13 A similar argument is made by Arriola and Johnson in an unpublished manuscript (Arriola and Johnson, 2012). 9

13 single-winner voting systems are more prone to electoral violence than voting systems that allow for multiple winners. In this paper, Höglund develops a number of interesting hypotheses about the causes of electoral violence. It is particularly noteworthy that she points to institutional factors such as a country s electoral system as potential determinants of pre-election violence. However, she unfortunately does not attempt to systematically test her hypotheses and fails to offer substantive evidence to support her claims. To my knowledge, Straus and Taylor (2009) are the first to analyze the phenomenon of electoral violence from a cross-national, quantitative perspective. They code a relatively crude four-point scale to measure the level of violence in all African elections between 1990 and While their primary aim is to map the frequency and spread of electoral violence across Africa, Straus and Taylor also develop a number of hypotheses to explain the variation in electoral violence across countries. Amongst other things, they predict that the likelihood of electoral violence is influenced by the closeness of the electoral race, the country s regime type, its growth rates and the level of ethnic polarization. Unfortunately, Straus and Taylor do not attempt to systematically test their propositions, despite the effort they put into gathering data on electoral violence. While the bivariate correlations presented in their paper seem to support at least some of their arguments, this rudimentary statistical method simply does not allow them to infer robust causal patterns. Using the newly available SCAD database on low-level social conflict in Africa for the period , Linebarger and Salehyan (2012) examine the conditions under which elections are more or less likely to become violent. Their events-based measure of electoral violence is more sophisticated than the four-point scale used by Straus and Taylor (2009), yet it does not distinguish precisely between pre- and post-election violence. Rather, it codes violent events that occurred before, during and after election months. Linebarger and Salehyan find that electoral contests in Africa are strongly associated with higher levels of low-level social conflict and election-related violence. They also hypothesize that elections held during civil war as well as elections in poor, authoritarian, post-conflict countries are more susceptible to violence. However, they do not find statistically significant evidence that elections during civil war or in post-conflict contexts are more likely to suffer from violence. In contrast, their findings indicate that mature democratic regimes as well as higher GDP per capita greatly diminish the level of violence during election months. Focusing on an international determinant of pre-election violence, Daxecker (2014) argues that the presence of international election monitors results in a temporal shift in the use of pre-election violence. She uses a SCAD-based measure of electoral violence and original data on election monitoring missions in Africa to show that the presence of reputable election monitors makes violence in the pre-election period more likely. She argues that this is the result of domestic elites strategically adjusting their manipulative tactics to the presence of monitors by moving the violence from the election day(s) to earlier periods in the campaign. Daxecker does not find evidence for a statistically significant effect of monitors on the level of violence on election day itself, but this might be due to her research design. The problem is that the level of pre-election violence is likely to alter the bargaining dynamics among domestic actors and hence influence the level of confrontation on election day. In other words, it becomes difficult to observe the direct effect of monitors on election-day violence, given that they influence the level of violence in the pre-election period. One of the most systematic empirical analyses of the causes of pre-election violence is presented in a recent paper by Hafner-Burton et al. (2014). They argue that the likelihood of pre-election violence can be predicted by a combination of two factors: Firstly, the incumbent s fear of losing power as the result of an election and, secondly, the institutionalized constraints placed on her decision-making powers. Hafner-Burton et al. hypothesize that the more uncertain the incumbent s victory and the less constrained she is to use state powers in her favour, the more likely it is that a country will experience pre-election violence. They systematically assess the observable implications of their argument, using variables from the NELDA dataset, which contains cross-country information on all election rounds between 1981 and 2004 (see Hyde and Marinov, 2012b). Hafner-Burton et al. find empirical support for their theoretical argument, while controlling for perceptions of pre-election fraud, the incumbent s age and tenure, economic development, population size, civil war, and the overall level of repression. Their paper presents perhaps the most thorough quantitative investigation into the causes of pre-election violence to date. However, it suffers from a number of methodological shortcomings. 10

14 Most importantly, Hafner-Burton et al. do not specify the perpetrator of the electoral violence in the coding of their main dependent variable ( Nelda33 ). This is problematic because the paper s central argument relies on the assumption that it is the incumbent who commits acts of pre-election violence in order to increase her chances of winning the election (see Hafner-Burton et al., 2014; p.150). However, Nelda33 codes any significant violence relating to the elections that resulted in civilian deaths (Hyde and Marinov, 2012a; p.16), regardless of whether it was committed by the incumbent s forces or by supporters of the opposition. This conceptual confusion is particularly unfortunate in light of recent studies on electoral violence in Africa, which suggest that the issue of who is the primary perpetrator of electoral violence is far from settled. While Daxecker (2014; p.240) and Collier and Vicente (2012) suggest that non-state actors or challengers are the primary perpetrators of electoral violence, Straus and Taylor (2009), Onapajo (2014) as well as Fjelde and Höglund (2015) find that incumbents are responsible for an overwhelming majority of violent events in the electoral period. Secondly, Hafner- Burton et al. do not differentiate between pre- and post-election violence in the coding of their main dependent variable 14 even though their argument relies on the conceptual separation of the two phases. Their main argument is that the likelihood of pre-election violence is determined primarily by the incumbents fear of losing power as well as the extent of institutional constraints placed upon her. However, in the second part of their paper, Hafner-Burton et al. also make a related (but distinct) argument about the consequences of pre-election violence. They suggest that the use of violence in the pre-election period increases the likelihood of post-election protests and state repression. In other words, they argue that pre-election violence, while often successful in manipulating elections in favour of the incumbent, can at the same time backfire by increasing the likelihood of post-election protest. These protests can in turn trigger state repression and can even precipitate the incumbent s downfall. Nelda33 is problematic as a measurement of pre-election violence given that it also includes violence perpetrated in the post-election period. This makes it difficult for Hafner-Burton et al. to claim that the former has a causal impact on the latter. Lastly, the key institutional explanatory variable used by Hafner-Burton et al. is not very well suited to establish an independent effect of institutional state features on the likelihood of pre-election violence. The variable executive constraints from the Polity IV Project is based on the executive s practice rather than a country s institutional or constitutional design and hence might be endogenous to the executive s resort to violence and repression (Marshall et al., 2013; p.24). Exactly which institutions impose executive constraints is also not at all apparent from the coding. According to the Polity IV codebook, any accountability groups can theoretically impose constraints on executive power. In Western democracies these are usually legislatures. However, other kinds of accountability groups included in the Polity IV measure are the ruling party in a one-party state, councils of nobles or powerful advisors in monarchies, the military in coup-prone polities, and in many states a strong, independent judiciary (Marshall et al., 2013; p.24). The number and variety of accountability groups is so large that it becomes difficult to draw any policy-relevant conclusions from the finding that the existence of executive constraints reduces the likelihood of electoral violence. Their argument about the consequences of pre-election violence is further developed in Hafner-Burton et al. (2012). In this working paper, the authors examine how the use of pre-election violence affects the chances of the incumbent to stay in power. To begin with, they hypothesize and show that the use of pre-election violence by the incumbent increases her chances of being re-elected by swaying voter turnout in her favour and precipitating election boycotts of opposition parties. Secondly, they argue that the use of pre-election violence increases the likelihood of post-election protests. These protests in turn make the annulment of elections more likely and often force the incumbent to resign. The empirical analysis presented in this working paper has similar shortcomings as the journal article reviewed above (see Hafner-Burton et al., 2014). Again, Hafner-Burton et al. use a composite measure of pre-election violence ( Nelda15 and Nelda33 ) that does not distinguish between pre-election violence and postelection violence. In addition, the measurement of pre-election violence also includes anti-incumbent violence and thus muddles up their argument about the impact of government-initiated violence on incumbent tenure. 14 The Nelda33 variable indicates whether there was significant violence involving civilian deaths immediately before, during or after the election (Hyde and Marinov, 2012a; p.16, emphasis added). 11

15 In a forthcoming article, Fjelde and Höglund (2015) argue that majoritarian electoral systems make unconsolidated democracies more susceptible to electoral violence given that the stakes in such systems are much higher than in proportional representation (PR) systems. They also hypothesize that majoritarian electoral systems are more likely to fuel violence in countries where economic inequality is high and where large ethno-political groups are systematically excluded from state power. Fjelde and Höglund (2015) test and confirm these three arguments using cross-national data on electoral violence in Sub-Saharan Africa between 1990 and Their paper represents the first serious attempt in the quantitative literature to analyze the way in which an institutional factor can influence a country s predisposition to experience electoral violence. One of the main methodological shortcomings of Fjelde and Höglund s paper is that their SCAD-based measure of electoral violence does not distinguish between pre- and post-election violence. In fact, they use country-months as their unit of analysis and they identify instances of electoral violence only by issue, thus completely disregarding the question of timing. This is problematic given that the dynamics of violence in the pre- and post-election period are likely to be fundamentally different (see Daxecker, 2014; Hafner-Burton et al., 2014) As mentioned earlier, the use of pre-election violence is primarily aimed at reducing the uncertainty of the election outcome, which can realistically be influenced by the type of electoral system in place. In contrast, post-election violence is a response to this outcome, which largely takes place outside the framework of formal electoral competition. Fjelde and Höglund (2015) ignore this important difference between preand post-election violence and hence cannot account for the fact that incentives to use violence may change depending on when it occurs. For example, Hafner-Burton et al. (2014) show that the incentives of incumbents to use violence in the pre-election period are primarily determined by the stakes of the electoral contest 15. However, they also show that in the post-election period these incentives change. Opposition mobilization in this period is now primarily determined by allegations of fraud in the pre-election period, whereas the incentives of the incumbent to use force against the opposition are primarily determined by institutionalized constraints placed upon her executive power. Thus, while Fjelde and Höglund (2015) can make a plausible argument about the impact of majoritarian systems on the likelihood of pre-election violence, they cannot at the same time assume that this institutional factor influences the likelihood of post-election violence in exactly the same way. Indeed, it seems more probable that post-election violence is determined by factors unrelated to the electoral system, given that the violent confrontation has now moved outside the domain of regular electoral competition. Be that as it may, Fjelde and Höglund (2015) simply cannot explore the different dynamics at play during the pre- and post-election period due to their restrictive research design. A second shortcoming relates to their distinction between government violence and opposition violence (see Fjelde and Höglund, 2015; p.11). They use a SCAD-based measure of opposition violence that includes all election-related violent activities by non-state actors that are anti-government or directed towards a distinct other group (p.11, emphasis added). The problem with this measure of anti-government electoral violence is that it includes violent events where the government is clearly not the target. Indeed, some of the opposition violence captured by Fjelde and Höglund s measure is perpetrated by non-state actors against opposition parties and opposition leaders 16. The authors would have been well advised to exclude these events from their measure of anti-government electoral violence. In the last few years, scholars have produced a number of pioneering articles and working papers that systematically examine pre-election violence from a quantitative perspective. This development is undoubtedly due to the recent proliferation of high-quality data sources on electoral violence and low-level conflict. Unfortunately, the quantitative studies reviewed above have not adequately incorporated the institutional explanations of electoral violence developed in the qualitative literature (see e.g. Höglund, 2009; Opitz et al., 2013). One important exception in this regard is the forthcoming paper by Fjelde and Höglund (2015). However, this paper only examines the impact of one particular institution (i.e. majoritarian electoral systems) on electoral violence and does not address other institutional factors such as decentralization, the separation of powers or state capacity. This gap in the literature is surprising, given that the more developed literature on conflict management and 15 While the stakes in Hafner-Burton s argument are determined by two different measures of electoral closeness ( Victory Uncertain and Polling Unfavourable ), the stakes in Fjelde and Höglund s argument are determined by the electoral system. 16 Other targets of such non-state violence include foreign governments, rival tribes and private companies. 12