 Stealing an Election: Violence or Fraud?Dawn Brancati and Elizabeth M Penn Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2023, vol. 67, issue 5, 858-892 Abstract: Political actors often resort to electoral violence to gain an edge over their competitors even though violence is harder to hide than fraud and more likely to delegitimize elections as a result. Existing explanations tend to analyze violence in terms of the same factors as fraud, or to treat violence as a means of last resorts given its overtness. We introduce a novel explanation that does neither, arguing that political actors often use violence for the very reason that it is hard to hide. Its overtness, we argue, allows political actors to observe whether the agents they enlist to manipulate elections for them do so and reduces these agents’ likelihood of shirking in turn. We develop our argument through a formal model showing that electoral monitors, by exacerbating problems of moral hazard (shirking), can induce actors to increasingly turn to violence and use process tracing to examine the implications of this model through the example of Egypt. Keywords: electoral violence; electoral fraud; electoral monitors; qualitative research; Egypt; Middle East and North Africa; game theory; formal theory; democracy; democratization; authoritarianregimes; democratic backsliding; elections; political parties (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:67:y:2023:i:5:p:858-892 DOI: 10.1177/00220027221120595 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International) |
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