Does electoral violence affect voting choice and willingness to vote? Evidence from a vignette experiment

Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero and Adrienne LeBas

No 2016-35, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Many new democracies experience electoral violence. Though this form of political violence is common, there is little understanding of how violence affects vote choice and turnout. This article draws on a vignette experiment that is embedded in a nationally representative survey in Kenya, where electoral violence has occurred several times since the 1990s. We show that voters strongly sanction candidates who are rumored to have used violence, even if the candidate is a coethnic, a copartisan, or has performed well in office in the past. This sanctioning effect, however, is not consistent across voters. Victims of past electoral violence and those in poverty are less likely to sanction candidates that use violence. Rumored use of violence also depresses turnout, even among a violent candidate’s core constituents, when voters do not possess countervailing information about the violent candidate’s past performance in office.

Keywords: Experimental Vignette; Violence; Voting; Turnout; Corruption; Ethnicity; Kenya (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fb6ba051-18ac-4c13-91dd-9923cb724fc2 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2016-35

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().