What Works in Preventing Election Violence? Evidence from Liberia and Kenya

Much research on election violence investigates causes and consequences but we know little about what works to mitigate violence. While existing work usually examines a single tool or single organizations, we introduce practice evaluations as an innovative method that examines the collective impact of domestic and international organizations engaged in a certain prevention practice. First, we examine whether multiple organizations using a similar approach reduce the risk of violence. Second, we compare the most common prevention tools to each other rather than just testing a single intervention and ignoring contemporaneous programs. We leverage original survey data from as-if randomly selected subnational locations in two recent elections (Kenya and Liberia 2017) and assess both the effects and the hypothesized mechanisms underlying each prevention practice. Preliminary results indicate that sound security sector engagement and election administration are the most effective, with mixed support for the underlying mechanisms. These findings have implications for research on conflict management and for the prioritization of practitioners and policy-makers active in countries at risk of election violence.