Electoral Violence and Manipulation Around the World

Abstract

As competitive elections have come to be the norm in the contemporary world, electoral processes have increasingly been beset by a variety of problems, including violence. Though electoral violence takes place in all regime types, it is especially prominent in electoral and new democracies. The study of electoral violence is under-developed, however, and most existing research on this topic focuses on the sub-Saharan African region. The goal of this panel is to draw together comparative studies of electoral violence from across the globe in order better to understand common trends and divergent patterns. Violence affects elections in a variety of ways: it is employed strategically in order to shape electoral institution design, candidacy choices and vote choice. It can break out spontaneously at various points during the electoral process, and it is not uncommon following an election, when the result is disputed and adherents of the losing party/candidate take to the streets to voice their protest. But underlying this variety is the common theme of force being used to distort an institution that is designed to be a peaceful and equitable means of making collective decisions. In this sense, any use of force during electoral periods challenges the democratic character of the electoral process and is for this reason of interest to students of electoral politics. The aim of this panel is to broaden the study of electoral violence by (1) presenting papers from regions of the world where electoral violence is known to be a serious problem, but where it has not received any degree of sustained attention from the political science community: Turkey and former communist Eastern Europe (the Western Balkans); and (2) to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon by drawing rigorous cross-national comparative analyses. The panel will include early career researchers (Mochtak and Muchlinski) together with senior scholars (Birch and Toros) and a scholar whose work spans the academic-practitioner divide (Burchard). The variety of geographic and theoretical perspectives represented in these papers will provide much-needed analytic leverage on the problem of electoral violence.