Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Political violence remains a pervasive feature of electoral dynamics in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, even where multiparty elections have become the dominant mode of regulating access to political power. With cross-national data on electoral violence in Sub-Saharan African elections between 1990 and 2010, this article develops and tests a theory that links the use of violent electoral tactics to the high stakes put in place by majoritarian electoral institutions. It is found that electoral violence is more likely in countries that employ majoritarian voting rules and elect fewer legislators from each district. Majoritarian institutions are, as predicted by theory, particularly likely to provoke violence where large ethno-political groups are excluded from power and significant economic inequalities exist.

The Dataset of Countries at Risk of Electoral Violence

“…There can be a number of actors involved in perpetrating electoral violence. 18 Because in many cases elections are the shortest route to political power, strong incentives exist for multiple actors to seize power through force. 19 Opposition parties and incumbents are perhaps the most obvious perpetrators and targets of electoral violence, and these actors have been the objects of a great deal of study.…”

“…19 Opposition parties and incumbents are perhaps the most obvious perpetrators and targets of electoral violence, and these actors have been the objects of a great deal of study. 20 Other actors may also have stakes in electoral outcomes and seek to use violence as a tool to realize those outcomes. As noted by North, Wallis, and Weingast, 21 violence is used in many less-than-democratic states as a coercive tool to penalize outgroups and reward clients.…”

Electoral violence under different contexts. Evidence from the Western Balkans

“…Most of the published papers in recent years have focused on electoral violence either from the macrostructural perspective with statistical models identifying factors potentially responsible for the escalation of violence (Fjelde and Höglund 2016;Gutiérrez-Romero 2014;Hafner-Burton et al 2013) or they have followed a more case-based approach in order to understand the specific instances of the phenomenon in space and time of a single case or a small number of cases (Boone and Kriger 2012;Sisk 2012;Wilkinson 2004). Although their findings have been insightful, the phenomenon of electoral violence is still understudied with a strong bias toward cases that are extreme in terms of fatalities and consequences.…”

“…The paper addresses the question of what settings are empirically relevant for the occurrence of electoral violence in the region of Western Balkans and what theoretical paths may cover their logic (?). The paper specifically focuses on seven broadly discussed preconditions that are seen as relevant for causing tension during elections in general: low quality of democracy, ethnic diversity, bad economic performance, violation of principles of rule of law, capacities and independence of electoral management bodies, proportionality of electoral system and dynamics of close electoral competition (Fjelde and Höglund 2016;Opitz et al 2013;Reilly 2001). The Western Balkans seem to be a perfect region for testing these expectations as it has come a long way since the early 1990s when ethnic tension, historical grievances, economic stagnation and authoritarian tendencies escalated into the most violent conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.…”

Group Size and Political Representation Under Alternate Electoral Systems

“…Myerson (1999) and Persson and Tabellini (2002) discuss and extensively review the literature on theoretical aspects of electoral systems. Empirically, some of the important outcome variables that have been studied with regard to effects of electoral systems are corruption (Kunicova and Ackerman, 2005), public attitude towards democracy (Banducci, Donovan and Karp, 1999), voter turnout (Herrera, Morelli and Palfrey, 2014;Kartal, 2014), and incentive to engage in conflict (Fjelde and Hoglund, 2014). Some papers such as Moser, 2008 and Wagner, 2014 have compared differences in the level of minority representation across the two systems by exploiting their variation over space and time in specific countries (Russia and Macedonia, respectively).…”