Party Competition and Election Violence in Constituencies Across the World

• In Event: Elections and Conflict

Abstract

Since 1990, deadly violence has occurred in more than 30% of elections held outside of advanced, industrialized democracies. In the 2007 Kenyan elections and the 2010 Côte d’Ivoire elections, violence killed thousands of people in just a few months, undoing years of institution-building and undermining democracy. Much of contemporary politics unfolds in countries holding competitive elections but lacking institutionalized democracy. In such countries, election violence still happens routinely because politicians can use violence to influence election outcomes in their favor.

We know a fair amount about why some elections turn violent while others do not, or which voters may be targeted more often, but lack insight into the more fundamental issues of how violence plays out on the ground. Scholarship has focused primarily on governments as perpetrators at the macro-level (Hafner-Burton, Hyde, and Jablonski 2014), or voters as targets of election violence at the micro-level (Mares and Young 2016). Departing from this scholarship, we focus on parties crucial meso-level actors for organizing and executing election violence. While parties play an important role in elections across the world, they do not figure prominently in existing theory and findings on election violence. Our paper asks how political parties - in particular competition between them - influence the risk for election violence. Building on Wilkinson’s (2004) seminal work, which has established the violence-increasing effects of party competition at the town and state-level in India, we hypothesize that party competition at the constituency-level creates incentives for individuals and groups to violently compete for local spoils. We combine this local-level argument with more macro-level dynamics that also affect incentives and opportunities for violence, in particular election type, type of electoral system, and government versus opposition status of parties.

Our empirical assessment of the effect of party competition on election violence combines constituency-level data on party fractionalization from the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA, Kollman et al. 2013) with geocoded event data on violence from the Electoral Contention and Violence (ECAV) dataset (Daxecker, Amicarelli, and Jung 2019) and covers the 1990-2012 period. Our paper provides the first systematic, global empirical test of the relationship between subnational party competition and election violence.

Authors

• Ursula E. Daxecker, University of Amsterdam

• Mike Medeiros, University of Amsterdam