Can Violence Narratives Shape Political Participation?:  Evidence from Nigeria, with Megan Turnbull

Pre-Analysis Plan. How do ordinary citizens engage with politicians and their political environment where elections are frequently manipulated with fraud and violence? We explore this question with a survey and conjoint experiment in Nigeria, a country that has some of the highest rates of election violence in Africa. We argue that in contexts where violence is expected and where many candidates either implicitly or explicitly condone or justify it, voters still have preferences over candidate behavior and characteristics which condition their participation in politics generally. We pay special attention to the narratives candidates who use violence deploy by examining whether respondents are more likely to select candidates who express remorse, use violence defensively, or use violence exclusively as opposed to other electoral manipulation strategies. Going beyond traditional assessments of vote choice as an outcome, we also examine whether exposure to certain types of candidate narratives reduces or increases political participation beyond voting, such as mobilizing in support or in condemnation of violent candidates, volunteering to reduce violence, or joining political parties.  Our findings nuance expectations of the effects of electoral violence on political participation and better help us understand the challenges facing voters in contexts where violence is rife.

Disaggregating Trauma: A Systematic Review of the Impact of Political Violence, with Biz Herman

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on trauma and its consequences in post-conflict and forced migration settings. Studies vary in whether they examine trauma exposure—the experience of living through an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury—or trauma response—the range of psychophysiological responses that emerge after trauma exposure. In this systematic review, we examine how different conceptualizations of trauma exposure and trauma response in conflict- and forced migration-affected populations produce consistent or disparate results across 164 papers. We examine variations in case selection, measurements used, identification strategy, and outcomes observed. This review comprehensively looks at the state of the emerging literature on the micro-level causes and consequences of violence, and offers paths forward in the conceptualization and measurement of trauma in studies seeking to better understand sociopolitical outcomes in trauma-affected populations. 

Seeing What Citizens Miss: How Monitors Improve Election Violence Reporting, with Leonardo Arriola, Arsène Brice Bado, Allison Grossman, and Aila M. Matanock (R&R at the Journal of Conflict Research)

Pre-Analysis Plan. Documenting election violence is central to safeguarding electoral integrity, but collecting such data is difficult. While citizen crowdsourcing is often seen as a cost-effective alternative to traditional monitoring, we argue that monitors provide unique advantages due to their training and insulation from local pressures. Our field experiment during Côte d’Ivoire’s 2020 presidential election assessed whether monitors enhance the documentation of election violence when used alongside citizen reporting. We found that the presence of a monitor increased the likelihood of violence being reported by 10.7 percentage points without affecting citizen behavior. Monitors with more geographic experience were more likely to report incidents, regardless of their proximity to home communities. These findings highlight the importance of monitors in revealing latent acts of violence, enhancing both the scope and depth of reports. This demonstrates the critical value monitors offer, even as crowdsourced data becomes more prevalent.

Consider the Source: Individual Variation in Reporting Electoral Violence, with Leonardo Arriola, Arsène Brice Bado, Allison Grossman, and Aila M. Matanock

​

Pre-Analysis Plan. The lack of locally sourced data remains an obstacle to improving knowledge about election violence around the world. Researchers continue to largely rely on secondhand forms of data, whether sourced from media reports or election monitors. But the uncertain accuracy and validity of such data sources raises critical questions about our understanding of fundamental dynamics relating to the victims and perpetrators of election violence. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for assessing the likelihood that differently situated individuals report on violent events they have witnessed or experienced firsthand. Drawing on an original survey conducted across 289 urban and rural locations in the run-up to Côte d’Ivoire’s 2020 presidential elections, we show that there is no significant difference in reporting between citizens and leaders despite social status distinctions. Instead, we find that key demographic factors consistently affect the likelihood of reporting: while women and rural residents are less likely to report violence, we find little systematic difference in reporting based on partisanship or ethnic identity. We show that violence reporting is correlated with exposure to other forms of conflict, namely, ethnic, religious, or land. We further show that there are few or small differences in the likelihood of reporting across forms of violence (i.e., property damage, killings, physical assaults, verbal threats). The findings presented here contribute to emerging discussions focused on improving data-collection methodologies for election violence and potential policy interventions aimed at reducing the outbreak of such violence. 

Competing Frames and Policymakers' Preferences for LGBT+ Protection: Experimental Evidence from Zambia,​ with Leonardo Arriola, Danny Choi,  Melanie Phillips, and Lise Rakner​

When are politicians willing to extend formal social protections to LGBT+ minorities? While the protection of civil liberties and rights for LGBT+ communities continues to feature prominently in political debates around the world, there is limited understanding of the factors that shape the views of politicians who enact the laws that govern these protections. This study examines the effectiveness of two competing frames – that cast the protection of LGBT+ individuals either as a public health crisis or a human rights crisis – that advocacy organizations frequently employ to persuade policymakers to liberalize their position on LGBT+ minority protection. Drawing on a survey and experiment conducted among more than 600 political candidates who contested for national and local office in Zambia, we show that gender moderates the effectiveness of different frames: whereas female politicians are significantly more likely to respond to the public health frame than the human rights frame, the effects are the opposite for male politicians. An analysis of open-ended responses provides suggestive evidence regarding the mechanism underlying these effects; the human rights frame appears to have reduced politicians' tendency to dehumanize members of the LGBT+ community.

Partisan Response to Term Limit Subversion and Democratic Backsliding: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire​, with Irene Morse

Across Africa we see manifestations of democratic backsliding – particularly attempts at term limit subversion – that are met with either resistance or compliance. How do partisans respond to these episodes of democratic backsliding? We argue that the response to these episodes will be predicated on how democracy is understood across the political spectrum. Particularly in post-conflict settings, incumbent supporters see democracy as fundamentally maintaining peace and reconciliation and will not mobilize against backsliding if it aligns with these goals. In contrast, opposition supporters understand democracy procedurally and thus will mobilize despite concerns about potential violence in doing so. To test this argument, we leverage two sources of data from Côte d’Ivoire, where the incumbent president made a successful bid at a third term in 2020: computational text analysis of over 1 million public posts in groups supporting political actors collected before and after the term limit subversion attempt and three rounds of Afrobarometer from 2015-2019. We show that first, understandings of democracy vary along the political spectrum. We then show that when a signal of democratic backsliding occurs, partisans change their discussion in line with our expectations: incumbent supporters maintain the relationship between peace and democracy without protest, while opposition supporters focus on procedural violations of democratic principles. These findings have implications for both policy and the scholarly community: if groups do not agree about what democracy fundamentally is, then it will make it difficult to recover from episodes of backsliding such as third term attempts. Further, we need to understand the differences between how different groups think about democracy before we can understand support or challenges in the face of backsliding.