Mitigating election violence locally: UN peacekeepers’ election-education campaigns in Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

False information, rumours and hate speech can incite violent protest and rioting during electoral periods. To counter such disinformation, United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs) routinely organize election-education events. While researchers tend to study how PKOs affect armed group and state behaviour, this study shifts the focus to civilians. It argues that PKOs’ election education reduces violent protest and rioting involving civilians during electoral periods via three pathways. First, learning about PKOs’ electoral security assistance during election-education events may convince people that political opponents cannot violently disturb elections, thereby mitigating fears of election violence. Second, election-education events provide politically relevant information that can strengthen political efficacy and people’s ability to make use of peaceful political channels. Finally, peace messages during election-education events can change people’s calculus about the utility and appropriateness of violent behaviour. Together, these activities mitigate fears, reduce political alienation and counter civilians’ willingness to get involved in violence. To test these expectations, I combine survey data on people’ perceptions and attitudes, events data on violent protest and rioting, and a novel dataset on local-level election-education events carried out by the PKO in Côte d’Ivoire before four elections held between 2010 and 2016. The results show that when the PKO is perceived to be an impartial arbiter, its election-education events have violence-mitigating effects at the individual and subnational levels.

Electoral violence: An introduction

“…Alternation in power is also endogenous to electoral management body performance, which points to the significance of conflict management and violence reducing efforts. Smidt (2020) confirms that these positive effects of conflict management can hold at the local level, indicating that aggregate and subnational expectations do at times converge.…”

“…Electoral violence in the context of other forms of violent conflict Finally, articles provide insight into how electoral violence is linked to and shaped by the presence of other forms of organized violence (Krause, 2020;González-Ocantos et al, 2020;Smidt, 2020). Krause (2020) focuses on communal violence triggered by elections in Nigeria and Kenya, and shows how the nature of communal conflict explains divergent patterns of sexual violence.…”

“…She demonstrates that opposition supporters with a greater sense of self-efficacy respond with anger rather than fear when presented with state violence. Offering a more positive picture, Smidt (2020) finds that election education campaigns by the United Nations in Côte d’Ivoire can make citizens less fearful of electoral violence and increase their sense of efficacy.…”

“…The strength and political inclusiveness of institutions are important mediators of the relationship between the instrumental aims of actors and their choice of political weapon. Strong and inclusive institutions can deter the use of force by promoting informed participation, representation, and transparency by means of credible democratic channels (Ruiz-Rufino & Birch, 2020; Fjelde, 2020; Smidt, 2020). Focusing on political parties, Fjelde (2020) demonstrates that more institutionalized parties reduce the risk of violence by facilitating nonviolent mobilization and constraining the use of force.…”

“…González-Ocantos et al’s (2020) study of voter intimidation in Guatemala suggests that the legacies of a civil war with high levels of civilian victimization and lingering violence by non-state actors creates an environment where intimidation can easily be disguised. The article by Smidt (2020) on UN intervention in Côte d’Ivoire informs the larger debate on postwar peacebuilding and the role that peacekeeping has in building peace versus promoting democracy. Her findings suggest that peacekeeping may assist both democracy and peace by making elections more secure with investments in election education.…”