Electoral Reform for Peace: Assessing Electoral Violence Prevention Strategies

In recent years, the study of electoral reform has moved beyond consideration of vote-to-seat conversion formulae to other aspects of the institutional architecture governing elections. Much of this work has been devoted to analysing reforms that improve the integrity of elections, and international actors are intimately involved in many such reform agendas. International electoral assistance has been instrumental in supporting electoral integrity around the world for several decades. Since 2007, the prevention of violence has played an increasingly large role in the electoral assistance activities undertaken by international agencies. Interventions designed to prevent and/or mitigate electoral violence include, for example, police training, electoral management body capacity building, and grassroots peace advocacy by civil society groups. There has to date been little systematic evaluation of the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions so as to enable them to maintain the peace during the electoral period. This paper will assess the effectiveness of EVP activities, arguing that success depends on the level of electoral violence in a state. In states where electoral violence is endemic, EVP is unlikely to have a significant impact; such activities are more likely to be successful in contexts where electoral violence occurs sporadically. The paper will further argue that EVP is most likely to be effective in targeting violence committed by political rivals and opposition groups, less effective in targeting violence perpetrated by state actors, and least effective in addressing electoral violence undertaken by insurgents and criminal groups. These hypotheses will be tested on a new global dataset of electoral violence, electoral institutions and electoral violence prevention strategies between 1995 and 2015, collected as part of the project on Explaining and Mitigating Electoral Violence at the University of Glasgow.