Fraud Is What People Make of It: Election Fraud, Perceived Fraud, and Protesting in Nigeria

Abstract

Why do fraudulent elections encourage protesting? Scholars suggest that information about fraud shapes individuals’ beliefs and propensity to protest. Yet these accounts neglect the complexity of opinion formation and have not been tested at the individual level. We distinguish between the mobilizing effects of actual incidents of election fraud and individuals’ subjective perceptions of fraud. While rational updating models would imply that both measures similarly affect mobilization, we argue that subjective fraud perceptions are more consistent predictors of protesting, also being shaped by attitudes, information, and community networks. Our empirical analysis uses geo-referenced individual-level data on fraud events, fraud perception, and protesting from the 2007 Nigerian elections. Our analysis yields two main findings: proximity to reported fraud has no effect on protesting and citizens perceiving elections as fraudulent are consistently more likely to protest, and more so if embedded in community networks.

UN Peacekeeping and Households' Well‐Being in Civil Wars

“…Peace missions may improve perceptions of safety by either reducing actual levels of violence or by signalling and deterring via highly visible activities such as community patrolling. Notably, research has shown that individuals' perceptions do not unambiguously match reported levels of crime (Velásquez et al 2020) or electoral fraud (Daxecker, Di Salvatore, and Ruggeri 2019), and other factors contribute to how these perceptions are formed. Similarly, perceived safety does not necessarily mirror actual violence, which suggests that households' perceptions may be decoupled from actual conflict-reducing effects of peacekeeping, especially if rising levels of nonconflict violence remains a source of insecurity (Di Salvatore 2019).…”

Electoral violence: An introduction

“…Working largely separately, scholars of elections outside the Western world have long been interested in the subversion of electoral processes through practices such as clientelism, vote-buying, and intimidation (Birch, 2007, 2011; Mares & Young, 2016; Norris, 2014; Schedler, 2013). Electoral violence is conceptualized as one of several tools elites can use to influence election outcomes (Birch, 2011, 2020; Daxecker, Di Salvatore & Ruggeri, 2019; van Ham & Lindberg, 2015; Mares & Young, 2016; Norris, Frank & Martínez i Coma, 2015; Schedler, 2002). Yet this literature has until recently focused more on particularistic rewards, neglecting the possibility that the determinants and implications of coercive strategies could be quite distinct (Mares & Young, 2016).…”

Public Distrust in Disputed Elections: Evidence from Latin America

“…By contrast, the subjective predictors include those factors that affect voters' election trust even when they are not necessarily related to the integrity of the process (Daxecker, Di Salvatore, and Ruggeri 2019). For example, several studies have shown how partisan attachments color individuals' perceptions of vote fraud (Alvarez, Hall, and Llewellyn 2008; Ansolabehere and Persily 2008; Beaulieu 2014b).…”