Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order

Sarah Birch

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691203645
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Campagnes politiques et élections

A comprehensive look at how violence has been used to manipulate competitive electoral processes around the world since World War II Throughout their history, political elections have been threatened by conflict, and the use of force has in the past several decades been an integral part of electoral processes in a significant number of contemporary states. However, the study of elections has yet to produce a comprehensive account of electoral violence. Drawing on cross-national data sets together with fourteen detailed case studies from around the world, Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order offers a global comparative analysis of violent electoral practices since the Second World War.Sarah Birch shows that the way power is structured in society largely explains why elections are at risk of violence in some contexts but not in others. Countries with high levels of corruption and weak democratic institutions are especially vulnerable to disruptions of electoral peace. She examines how corrupt actors use violence to back up other forms of electoral manipulation, including vote buying and ballot stuffing. In addition to investigating why electoral violence takes place, Birch considers what can be done to prevent it in the future, arguing that electoral authority and the quality of electoral governance are more important than the formal design of electoral institutions.Delving into a deeply influential aspect of political malpractice, Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order explores the circumstances in which individuals choose to employ violence as an electoral strategy.

1

Introduction

In 2001 the populist Thaksin Shinawatra came to power in Thailand, vowing to reform the country’s corrupt political system. His period of rule was characterized by heightened political tension, repression, and human rights violations. During this time, elections changed from being opportunities for power brokering among provincial bosses to high-stakes contests between the ruthless president and his opponents (Kongkirati 2014). The 2001 and 2005 Thai elections resulted in 26 and 30 deaths respectively, a dramatic increase from the pre-2001 period when election-related fatalities were rare (Callahan 2000; Callahan and McCargo 1996; Kongkirati 2014; McCargo and Desatová 2016). The aim of this book is to develop an enhanced understanding of the causes of electoral violence such as that witnessed in Thailand, and to assess strategies best suited to preventing conflict from disrupting the vote. In recent decades, more countries have begun to hold elections, but many of these events have been beset by the use of force, which undermines states’ core economic, social, and political functions. In some contexts elections have helped to move nascent democracies toward accountable participatory modes of governance, whereas in other settings the democratic potential of elections has been distorted by manipulation and the use of coercion. In the aftermath of the Kenyan polls of 2007, an estimated 1133 people died, 3561 were injured, and 350,000 were displaced (CIPEV 2008). The Côte d’Ivoire election of 2010 led to conflict that killed an estimated 3000 people and displaced a million in late 2010 and early 2011 (Bekoe 2012a). At least 400 people were killed during the 2014 elections in Bangladesh, a figure which is not atypical for this country (Macdonald 2016; cf. Akhter 2001), and close to 200 died in a series of violent attacks that took place in the run-up to the Pakistani election of 2018 (EU 2018). A recent surge in studies of electoral misconduct has gone some way toward helping scholars and practitioners to understand many forms of electoral manipulation, but scholarship on electoral violence is somewhat more fragmentary, with the majority of existing studies focusing on individual states or regions.

There is reason to believe that electoral violence is a serious global problem. The available data suggest that globally approximately 88 percent of elections in the 1995–2013 period were afflicted by one or more politically motivated, violent attacks during the electoral cycle. Moreover, electoral violence is not confined to fragile democracies and authoritarian states. Even established democracies are not immune to conflictual elections, as evidenced by the clashes between far-right and antiracist groups that took place at campaign events in the run-up to the 2019 European Parliament elections in the United Kingdom, the pipe bombs posted to prominent political figures in advance of the 2018 US midterm election, and the violence that broke out during and after the controversial Catalan independence vote of 2017.

Why are elections in some places generally peaceful, whereas other societies regularly experience conflictual polls? Why is one election in a country peaceful and the next violent? This book aims to provide a comprehensive account of the use of force to manipulate competitive electoral processes, with a particular emphasis on national-level elections held during peacetime in the post–Second World War period. The focus of analysis is on the strategic behavior of incumbent and opposition actors—also referred to here as state and nonstate actors—with particular (but not exclusive) emphasis on electoral authoritarian and hybrid states.¹ Some previous analyses have argued that opposition groups and other actors outside the state are those most likely to undertake salient forms of electoral violence (e.g. Collier and Vicente 2012, 2014; Daxecker 2012). However, the data collected for this study suggest that across the globe, the majority of electoral violence is committed by state actors, and there are strong theoretical reasons to believe that the settings in which force is employed during electoral processes are shaped mainly by the state. The analyses presented here will frame electoral violence in terms of the incentives inherent in power structures of different types and will seek to ascertain the circumstances under which these institutions allow violence to occur, as well as the ways in which violence interacts with other forms of electoral manipulation. An argument is developed about electoral violence as a tool for regulating political exclusion, which is then tested on a range of quantitative and qualitative data from around the world using estimation techniques that enable the analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal predictors of electoral violence simultaneously. The investigation also assesses the most efficacious approaches that can be taken by internal and external actors to mitigate this phenomenon.

Context and Argument

Peaceful, democratic elections are central to a fair society. Elections are institutions that establish a means of gaining power and legitimacy. But there are many ways in which competitive elections can be won: through open competition on the basis of alternative policy proposals, by means of vote buying and other types of electoral manipulation, or through the use of force. This volume provides a general investigation of the circumstances under which political actors will select combinations of these options.

Though the study of electoral violence remains underdeveloped, the problem is receiving increasing attention from students of comparative politics. Acts of peacetime violence have been the subject of human rights research for over 30 years now (Mitchell and McCormick 1988; Poe and Tate 1994), where the focus has been primarily on the violations of rights to physical integrity. More recently a number of scholars have considered the relationship between political violence, civil conflict, and the holding of elections.² There have also been a number of studies devoted specifically to violence that is directed at the electoral process itself, which is the topic of this study. Much of the existing empirical research has sought to identify the range of factors associated with electoral violence. These have been found by scholars to include socioeconomic variables, such as economic development and/or inequality,³ and ethnic divisions or inequalities across ethnic groups.⁴ Also found in many studies to be relevant are political factors such as competitive dynamics and closeness of the race,⁵ electoral integrity,⁶ electoral and other political institutions,⁷ level of democracy,⁸ informal institutions,⁹ and international election observation.¹⁰ A history of conflict has likewise been linked in several studies to levels of conflict in elections.¹¹ Other work has considered the timing of violence.¹² A further strand of research on electoral violence has focused on the actors involved, including strategies of mobilization and demobilization.¹³ Despite the recent surge of interest in the interactions between electoral processes and conflict processes, much work remains to be done in this emergent subfield, given that there are also many questions left unanswered by these analyses, as well as findings that would profit from testing in a wider context.

Two of the main areas that would benefit from more extensive investigation are the power structures most conducive to electoral violence in a society in general, and the role of violence in the arsenal of strategies at the disposal of those involved in particular electoral contests that take place in that society. Though a number of previous analyses have touched on these topics, they have mostly either been based on individual case studies or regional investigations, or been large-N comparisons designed to ascertain general trends rather than to probe context-specific strategies. By drawing on a range of data sources and employing a variety of methods, this study develops and tests a novel integrated theory of electoral violence that links and elaborates on a number of propositions about the contextual determinants of this phenomenon. It also goes beyond existing work in shedding new light on the impact of interventions intended to reduce electoral conflict.

I start from the proposition that political violence is a tool for regulating political exclusion, and that when weak democratic institutions are combined with dysfunctional informal institutions, the scene is set for violent elections. The corollary of this argument is that violence can be avoided if democratic and/or informal institutions are so configured as to provide leaders with the incentives and the means to limit themselves to alternative electoral strategies. Let us unpack these claims. Violence is used by state actors (and their proxies) mainly as a tool to exclude other actors from political power in competitive elections, and violence is used by nonstate actors largely as a means of contesting such exclusion and seeking access to power. Elections are high-stakes affairs in states with weak democratic institutions and strong informal institutions of clientelism, patronage, and corruption. In such contexts, those in power control economic and legal as well as political resources, such that incumbents have ample reason to fear loss of power. In addition, they have reason to fear that if they lose a crucial election they will themselves be permanently excluded from ruling, as the victors may be reluctant to allow genuinely competitive contests in future. Political orders characterized by high levels of corruption and ineffectual democratic institutions are therefore ones that are strongly conducive to electoral violence. If electoral violence is largely a function of the way power is structured in different political orders, it follows that violence will no longer be such a viable strategy when corruption falls and democratic institutions are strengthened.

But if the structure of power determines whether violence is a viable electoral strategy, the use of force is only ever one of several tools that can be employed to regulate exclusion in the electoral sphere. The second core component of my argument is that violence is typically used in order to backstop other types of electoral manipulation. When there are insufficient disincentives to the use of force, state actors will most commonly use it as a means of supplementing and supporting electoral misconduct (the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Carrots and Sticks: Toward a Theory of Electoral Violence
• 3. Coercive Electoral Governance: The Use of Force by State Actors
• 4. Violence by Nonstate Actors
• 5. Divergent Contexts and Patterns of Violent Elections
• 6. Strategies of Electoral-Violence Prevention
• 7. Conclusion: Implications for Theory, Policy, and Practice
• References
• Index