Kenya plans to hold general elections in early March this year, and many observers fear those contests will spur a reprisal of the mass violence that swept parts of that country after balloting in December 2007. The Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention says Kenya is at “high risk” of genocide in 2013, and a recent contingency-planning memo from Joel Barkan the Council on Foreign Relations asserts that “there will almost certainly be further incidents of violence in the run-up to the 2013 elections.” As a recent Africa Initiative backgrounder points out, this violence has roots that stretch much deeper than the 2007 elections, but the fear that mass violence will flare again around this year’s balloting seems well founded.
All of which got me wondering: is this a generic problem? We know that election-related violence is a real and multifaceted thing. We also have works by Jack Snyder and Amy Chua, among others, arguing that democratization actually makes some countries more susceptible to ethnic and nationalist conflict rather than less, as democracy promoters often claim. What I’m wondering, though—as someone who has long studied democratization and is currently working on tools to forecast genocide and other forms of mass killing—is whether or not elections substantially increase the risk of mass atrocities in particular, where “mass atrocities” means the deliberate killing of large numbers of unarmed civilians for apparently political ends.
Best I can tell, the short answer is no. After applying a few different statistical-modeling strategies to a few measures of atrocities, I see little evidence that elections commonly trigger the onset or intensification of this type of political violence. The absence of evidence isn’t the same thing as evidence of absence, but these results convince me that national elections aren’t a major risk factor for mass killing.
If you’re interested in the technical details, here’s what I did and what I found:
My first cut at the problem looked for a connection between national elections and the onset of state-sponsored mass killings, defined as “a period of sustained violence” in which ” the actions of state agents result in the intentional death of at least 1,000 noncombatants from a discrete group.” That latter definition comes from work Ben Valentino and I did for my old research program, the Political Instability Task Force, and it restricts the analysis to episodes of large-scale killing by states or other groups acting at their behest. Defined as such, mass killings are akin to genocide in their scale, and there have only been about 110 of them since 1945.
So, do national elections help trigger this type of mass killing? To try to answer this question, I thought of elections as a kind of experimental “treatment” that some country-years get and others don’t. I used the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) data set to identify country-years since 1945 with national elections for chief executive or legislature or both, regardless of how competitive those elections were. I then used the MatchIt package in R to set up a comparison of country-years with and without elections within 107 groups that matched exactly on several other variables identified by prior research as risk factors for mass-killing onset: autocracy vs. democracy, exclusionary elite ideology (yes/no), salient elite ethnicity (yes/no), ongoing armed conflict (yes/no), any mass killing since 1945 (yes/no), and Cold War vs. post-Cold War period. Finally, I used conditional logistic regression to estimate the difference in risk between election and non-election years within those groups.
The results? In my data, mass-killing episodes were 80% as likely to begin in election years as non-election years, other things being equal. The 95% confidence interval for this association was wide (45% to 145%), but the result suggests that, if anything, countries are actually somewhat less prone to suffer onsets of mass killing in election years as non-election years.
I wondered if the risk might differ by regime type, so I reran the analysis on the subset of cases that were plausibly democratic. The estimate was effectively unchanged (80%, CI of 35% to 185%). Then I thought it might be a post-Cold War thing and reran the analysis using only country-years from 1991 forward. The estimate moved, but in the opposite of the anticipated direction. Now it was down to 60%, with a CI of 17% to 215%.
These estimates got me worried that something had gone wacky in my data, so I reran the matching and conditional logistic regression using coup attempts (successful or failed) instead of elections as the “treatment” of interest. Several theorists have identified threats to incumbents’ power as a cause of mass atrocities, and coups are a visible and discrete manifestation of such threats. My analysis strongly confirmed this view, indicating that mass-killing episodes were nearly five times as likely to start in years with coup attempts as years without, other things being equal. More important for present purposes, this result increased my confidence in the reliability of my earlier finding on elections, as did the similar estimates I got from models with country fixed effects, country-specific intercepts (a.k.a. random effects), and interaction terms that allowed the effects of elections to vary across regime types and historical eras.
Then I wondered if this negative finding wasn’t an artifact of the measure I was using for mass atrocities. The 1,000-death threshold for “mass killing” is quite high, and the restriction to killings by states or their agents ignores situations of grave concern in which rebel groups or other non-state actors are the ones doing the murdering. Maybe the danger of election years would be clearer if I looked at atrocities on a smaller scale and ones perpetrated by non-state actors.
To do this, I took the UCDP One-Sided Violence Dataset v1.4 and wrote an R script that aggregated its values for specific conflicts into annual death counts by country and perpetrator (government or non-government). Then I used R’s ‘pscl’ package to estimate zero-inflated negative binomial regression (ZINB) models that treat the death counts as the observable results of a two-stage process: one that determines whether or not a country has any one-sided killing in a particular year, and then another that determines how many deaths occur, conditional on there being any. In addition to my indicator for election years, these models included all the risk factors used in the earlier matching exercise, plus population size and the logged counts of deaths from one-sided violence by government and non-government actors (separately) in the previous year. All of these variables were included in the logistic regression “hurdle” model; only elections, population size, and the lagged death counts were included in the conditional count models.
To my surprise once again, the results suggested that, if anything, atrocities the risk of mass atrocities is actually lower in years with national elections. In the model of government-perpetrated violence, the coefficient for the election indicator in the hurdle model was barely distinguishable from zero (0.04), and the association in the count portion was modestly negative (-0.20, s.e. of 0.20). In the model of violence perpetrated by other groups, the effect in the hurdle portion was modestly negative (-0.25, s.e. of 0.20), and the effect in the count portion was decidedly negative (-0.82, s.e. of 0.19). When I reran the models with separate indicators for executive and legislative elections, the results bounced around a little bit, but the basic patterns remained unchanged. None of the models showed a substantial, positive association between either type of election and the occurrence or scale of one-sided violence against civilians.
In light of the weakness of the observed effects, the noisiness of the measures employed, and my prior beliefs about the effects of elections on risks of mass killing—shaped in part by the Kenyan case I discussed at the start of this post—I’m not quite ready to assert that election years actually reduce the risk of mass atrocities. What I am more comfortable doing, however, is ignoring elections in statistical models meant to forecast mass atrocities across large numbers of countries.
If you’re interested in replicating or tweaking this analysis, please email me at ulfelder@gmail.com, and I’ll be happy to send you the data and R scripts (one to get country-year summaries of the UCDP data, another to run the matching and modeling) I used to do it. [UPDATE: I’ve put the scripts and data in a publicly accessible folder on Google Drive. If you try that link and it doesn’t work, please let me know.] Ideally, I would cut out the middleman by putting them in a Github repository, but I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet. If you’re in the DC area and interested in getting paid to walk me me through that process, please let me know.
Dart-Throwing Chimp 
Matt Krain
/ January 14, 2013Very interesting. I wonder whether this is because election years are years where government actions are more visible (they are watched more carefully by the international community), whereas other years allow atrocities to occur in relative obscurity.
dartthrowingchimp
/ January 14, 2013Thanks for reading and weighing in, Matt. Interesting point. That would gibe with the evidence in my data that the relative risk of election years is even lower in the post-Cold War period, when international observation of elections has become the norm.
Chris Hanretty (@chrishanretty)
/ January 14, 2013For simple scripts, or even simple sets of scripts, pasting into a Github gist can be helpful. This from someone who is mortally afraid of Git.
dartthrowingchimp
/ January 14, 2013Thanks, I’ll give that a look. There are professional reasons I’d like to learn how to build proper repositories there, but this might be a helpful stopgap measure.
Cara Jones (@ProfCaraJones)
/ January 14, 2013Interesting results… Does it matter what type of election? I.e. the analysis suggests ALL elections, but could there be a difference between legislative vs. presidential/executive (in places that don’t vote on the same schedules?) Also, I wonder about the effect of prior violence on your model is… Kenya had previous outbreaks in 2007, 1992, and 1997. Good stuff!
dartthrowingchimp
/ January 14, 2013From my analysis of the UCDP one-sided violence data, no, it doesn’t seem like the type of election (legislative vs. executive) matters. Of course, that’s not an exhaustive treatment of that question, and there are other aspects of elections I didn’t consider here that might also matter: PR vs. plurality, single round vs. multi-round, etc. With more complete data on both sides of the equation, it would be really interesting to explore those questions.
Daniel Solomonolomon
/ January 14, 2013This is very insightful–as someone who works on mass atrocity issues, I found yours to be a helpful think-piece on the ways in which we contemplate policy responses to mass violence against civilians. It’s worth thinking about entry points for qualitative analysis in explaining this anomaly, particularly given the ubiquity of case study research, as well as quantitative analysis (see Krain, Rummel), that indicates precisely the opposite, or at least the opposite of a corollary hypothesis (concerning state-sponsored genocide/democide, rather than mass atrocities more broadly).
I’m just spitballing here, but it may have something to do with the way that we understand and interpret the drivers of electoral violence (see Autesserre’s DRC critique, always). In my analysis of electoral violence, I’ve increasingly–if not conclusively–identified a role for “violent entrepreneurs” in driving mass violence surrounding elections. That is, national elites who exploit localized politics for particular ends, largely through violent means. We’ve talked about this before, but I tend to see Kenya and Nigeria as particularly representative of this political enterprise. The problem is, by focusing on electoral contests, we obstruct the continuities in localized violence that contribute to seemingly electoral outbreaks. See, for example, Nigeria’s 2007 elections, which were the most violent national polls since the country’s civilian transition. When violent events break out in central Nigeria, it’s viewed as “electoral violence,” despite cyclical patterns of conflict already in place. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the violence was not electoral, per se (apologies for the double negative), but classifying at such constructs a causal link where one may not be as clear.
Apologies for the long comment–one has to avoid thesis-writing somehow. Thanks for the insight!
dartthrowingchimp
/ January 14, 2013Thanks, Daniel. One big point to keep in mind is that I was looking at state-sponsored mass-killing episodes and “one-sided violence,” not all the forms of violence that get rolled up in the term “election-related violence.” In other words, I’m not disputing the broader claim that the risk of violence rises around elections in some countries, because this analysis wasn’t designed to answer that question. I suspect that a lot of what gets rolled up under the “election-related violence” tag wouldn’t fit the definitions of either of the dependent variables I used.
Also, which works by Krain and Rummel are you referring to? If there’s something specific that points in the opposite direction, I’d like to see how they got there.
Nicolas Rost
/ January 17, 2013Very interesting blog post (and blog in general). Just a thought: maybe elections are less likely to be organized in years when mass killings are already happening?
Jason Stern (@IbnLarry)
/ January 17, 2013Thanks for some interesting work here. I wonder if there’s a lag between elections and ethnic violence? Have you run the data to compare elections in year x leading to violence in year x+1? Off top of head I could see a few reasons why this could be the case:
1. Accusations of electoral fraud boil over and delegitimize the results.
2. Appointment to government posts that favor one ethnic group over another.
3. The newly elected government, believing it has a mandate, enacts inflammatory policies.
4. Battle over rents after elections bring in a new government.
5. As mentioned above, intl observers lose interest once polls close.