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While no recorded measure of electoral violence is free from error, the fact that many measures of this concept rely heavily on the timing of violence to justify its coding leaves substantial uncertainty regarding whether such violence would still have occurred in the absence of any election. Commonly utilized datasets on this phenomenon are hand coded and conceptual ambiguity can easily creep into published measures as coders impose their own subjective biases into the data-generating process (Brass, Reference Brass1997). Most studies of electoral violence tacitly assume that violence which occurs contemporaneously with an election is also related to the election, but there are legitimate reasons to be skeptical. We follow Birch and Muchlinski ( Reference Birch and Muchlinski2020, 3) who define electoral violence as, “coercive force, directed toward electoral actors and/or objects, that occurs in the context of electoral competition.”Įlectoral violence is often conceptualized at quite high levels of aggregation utilizing blunt categories including whether there were post-election protests, whether “civilians were killed in significant numbers,” and whether government forces harassed opposition candidates (Hyde and Marinov, Reference Hyde and Marinov2012).
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The causal link, which is often more implicit, limits electoral violence to that which is in some way connected to the electoral process, as opposed to violence that takes place during the electoral process but has no direct bearing on the election. Electoral violence is conventionally understood as violence that takes place contemporaneously with the electoral cycle. Inherent in most definitions of electoral violence is the temporal link between violence and elections and the causal link between the two. Research into the causes of electoral violence has recently become more systematic, examining the conditions under which incumbents are likely to use violence to influence the electoral process (Hafner-Burton et al., Reference Hafner-Burton, Hyde and Jablonski2014), the effects of electoral institutions on electoral violence (Fjelde and Höglund, Reference Fjelde and Höglund2016), and the conditions under which ethnic diversity contributes to such conflict (Butcher and Goldsmith, Reference Butcher and Goldsmith2017).ĭespite the increased interest in electoral violence, the concept remains theoretically underdeveloped and conceptually vague (Staniland, Reference Staniland2014). Unfortunately, electoral politics has become intertwined with violence across much of the world (Dunning, Reference Dunning2011). Elections are the most common means by which citizens select and provide legitimacy to their political leaders.