Do Contentious Elections Trigger Violence?

Kuhn, Patrick M.

doi:10.4324/9781315723068-5

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(46 reference statements)

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“…Regarding societal factors, scholars have linked ethnic polarization, the exclusion of ethnic groups from power, and parties representing particular ethnic or religious identities to greater incentives for electoral violence (Fjelde & Höglund, 2016a;Kuhn, 2015;Nellis, Weaver & Rosenzweig, 2016;Nellis & Siddiqui, 2018;Wilkinson, 2004). Furthermore, land patronage can provide elites with powerful tools for violent electoral mobilization (Boone, 2011;Boone & Kriger, 2012;Klaus & Mitchell, 2015).…”

Section: What We Know About Electoral Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral violence: An introduction

Birch

Daxecker

Höglund

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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Elections are held in nearly all countries in the contemporary world. Yet despite their aim of allowing for peaceful transfers of power, elections held outside of consolidated democracies are often accompanied by substantial violence. This special issue introduction article establishes electoral violence as a subtype of political violence with distinct analytical and empirical dynamics. We highlight how electoral violence is distinct from other types of organized violence, but also how it is qualitatively different from nonviolent electoral manipulation. The article then surveys what we have learned about the causes and consequences of electoral violence, identifies important research gaps in the literature, and proceeds to discuss the articles included in the special issue. The contributions advance research in four domains: the micro-level targeting and consequences of electoral violence, the institutional foundations of electoral violence, the conditions leading to high-stakes elections, and electoral violence in the context of other forms of organized violence. The individual articles are methodologically and geographically diverse, encompassing ethnography, survey vignette and list experiments and survey data, quantitative analyses of subnational and crossnational event data, and spanning Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

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Section: What We Know About Electoral Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral violence: An introduction

Birch

Daxecker

Höglund

2020

Journal of Peace Research

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“…Zimbabwe exhibits an unusually high amount of electoral violence even for Africa (Kuhn, 2015). The military plays an outsized role in politics.…”

Section: Pair 3: Zambia and Zimbabwementioning

confidence: 99%

Political regimes and foreign investment in poor countries: Insights from most similar African cases

Goldsmith

2021

European Journal of International Relations

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When foreign investors choose to invest in a poor country, do they favor democracies or autocracies? Despite extensive time-series cross-national empirical work on this question, the answer is unclear. To move the debate forward, I use a novel approach based on a most-similar case design. I observe four African countries before, during, and after democratization, and evaluate whether the change in regime type over time affected their ability to attract foreign investment—both relative to their baseline level of investment and in comparison with the investment patterns of four matching countries that did not experience democratization. I also control for the effects of natural resource scarcity and abundance. My difference-in-differences pairwise case analysis indicates the introduction of competitive political institutions is immaterial for foreign investment, whereas the consolidation of these institutions conveys a small investment advantage.

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“…Examples of these studies include Pippa Norris, Richard W. Frank, and Ferran Martinez I Coma's piece on "Contentious Elections: From Votes to Violence" which conceptualised the conditions responsible for opposition parties to challenge "the legitimacy of electoral actors, procedures, or outcomes" (2015:2). Patrick M. Kuhn's (2015) chapter entitled, "Do Contentious Elections Trigger Violence?" also examined the social conditions that make it attractive for political actors to resort to pre-electoral violence during elections.…”

Section: Electoral Violence and Democratization In Africa: A Brief LImentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mitigation of Electoral Violence and Conflict Management in Africa

Thompson

2020

Preprint

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This article seeks to explore how in practice traditional leaders enforce the norms of peace and tolerance as a means of mitigating electoral violence and resolving electoral disputes. The extant literature on democratization focuses more on the formal institutional mechanisms in explanations of the success or failure of the recent democratic experiments in Africa. These institutional theories have failed to fully account for the nuances of disputed electoral outcomes in terms of the varying intensity of electoral violence in different national contexts. As a result, the critical role of traditional authorities (such as Chiefs) in the mitigation of violence and the resolution electoral disputes as a substitute (or complement) to formal electoral institutions and judiciary when they become ineffective in critical situations has been neglected in the literature. This study critically examines the 'positive' roles of centralised traditional authorities and shared norms (such as peace, harmony and tolerance) in accounting for the variations in the nuances of post-electoral violence. It demonstrates this type of mediation as a conflict transformation tool by examining the Ghanaian 1992 and Kenyan 2007 disputed presidential elections from a comparative perspective. Finally, it draws some important lessons for policymakers and democracy promoters in their efforts to build sustainable democratic institutions, peace and stability in Africa.

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Do Contentious Elections Trigger Violence?

Cited by 11 publications

References 42 publications

Electoral violence: An introduction

Electoral violence: An introduction

Political regimes and foreign investment in poor countries: Insights from most similar African cases

The Mitigation of Electoral Violence and Conflict Management in Africa

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