Explaining and Mitigating Electoral Violence

Elections are a means of adjudicating political differences through peaceful, fair, democratic mechanisms. When elections are beset by violence, these aims are compromised and political crises often result. Despite the undisputed importance of understanding electoral violence, there has been only a limited body of systematic comparative research on this topic. If scholars and practitioners are to gain insight into the dynamics of electoral violence and develop superior strategies for deterring it, better data and more sophisticated theories are required.

The aim of this project is to develop conceptual, methodological and practical tools to facilitate an enhanced understanding of electoral violence and the behavioural interventions best suited to preventing it, with a view to sustaining fair and vibrant societies. The project will involve the construction of two databases of electoral violence and will make these data available to those engaged in electoral assistance, electoral administration and electoral observation as well as academic and other researchers. The project will also use the resulting data to develop and test a series of theoretically-driven propositions about the causes of electoral violence and to assess a range of interventions designed to prevent violent behaviours. Finally, the project will generate an online electoral violence early warning tool that can be used to provide relevant information about current electoral risks.

The project will be of considerable use both to academic students of election and conflict and to practitioners in the fields of contentious politics, electoral assistance, electoral observation, electoral administration, human rights, international relations, criminology and development studies. Electoral violence is frequently an aspect of contentious politics. Though contentious politics can play an important role in the democratic process, it raises problems for democracy both when it generates violence and when it disrupts key phases of the electoral cycle. Given the centrality of both contentious politics and elections to our understanding of contemporary political processes, this study promises to yield considerable benefits to a wide range of academic fields.

In addition to scholars, many actors with a stake in peaceful elections urgently require superior means of averting disruptive forms of violence that threaten political stability, state-building and development. Since the violent interlude that followed the Kenyan elections of 2007, there has been an increased focus on the topic of electoral violence and a heightened sense of urgency in the international community's search for remedies, as exemplified by the 2012 final report of the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security, chaired by Kofi Annan. One of the key recommendations of this report was 'to develop institutions, processes, and networks that deter election-related violence and, should deterrence fail, hold perpetrators accountable'. The proposed research is intended to make a substantial contribution towards this aim, which has become all the more urgent following the recent increase in violent behaviours in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Finally, the project will innovate methodologically by integrating 'big data' retrieval methods into political science. Political scientists have to date made scant use of the possibilities represented by current data retrieval techniques; by enabling collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists, this project will facilitate the collection of a dataset of unprecedented size in the study of electoral violence, and it will allow the researchers to tap types of online data that have not heretofore been harnessed to study this phenomenon.

The impact of this research will be conceptual, technical and methodological. The research will contribute to the understanding of electoral violence by policy-makers and practitioners; it will also focus attention on the problem of electoral violence so that its prevention can become a higher priority on the international agenda. By developing new measures of electoral violence, the research will enable the impact of preventative policies and programmes to be tracked from election to election. The analysis and evaluation of commonly-used violence mitigation strategies will influence their future design. The research will also contribute to methodological innovation by introducing 'big data' methods to the study of elections.

This research is focused around the needs of a clearly-defined group of practitioner organisations with a stake in preventing electoral violence, including Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs), protective forces, and international electoral assistance and conflict resolution providers such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), International IDEA, the Council of Europe (CofE), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Organization of American States (OAS), the European Commission, the Department for International Development (DfID) and and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

These stakeholders will benefit from the research in three ways: 1) through the development of a conceptual approach to profiling and gauging the intensity of electoral violence that can feed directly into their own project designs; 2) through the evaluation of the strategies they use; and 3) through the use of project datasets and research findings for their own purposes.

Practical collaboration between the investigators and user groups was at the origin of this project, which was conceived in response to identified problems faced by users in the field. The relevant groups will be consulted on the design of the data collection activities and they will be asked to help identify and provide relevant qualitative data on electoral assistance initiatives. Draft project outputs will be sent to selected members of these groups for comment.

There will be virtual collaboration via a dedicated web-based message board and blog to which user groups will be invited to contribute. There will also be active engagement of these groups in the project's research via the Steering Group. In addition, three user workshops will focus attention on project design and findings and will an avenue for developing collaborative links.

In order to assure wide involvement in the research and its use, several communications strategies will be employed. The interactive project website will be one of the principal tools through which project data and research updates and results will be disseminated. In addition to the academic outputs, there will be a series of papers drafted specially for non-academic publications. The researchers will also actively seek opportunities to place articles in national and international media. An end-of-project workshop will bring together approximately two dozen project stakeholders and beneficiaries and communicate the research findings to them.

Finally, methodological innovation will be achieved through the further development of the University of Glasgow's unique Terrier approach to data retrieval, which will be employed to generate a database of incidents of electoral violence in approximately three dozen elections across the world. The methodological innovations resulting from this project will be showcased via presentations and publications and specialist fora.