Competing Verdicts: Multiple Election Monitors and Post-Election Violence
P2-05
Presented by: Daniela Donno
By influencing beliefs about electoral quality, international election observers can play an important role in shaping post-election mobilization and violence. Existing research has focused on the mobilizing role of criticism by a small sub-set of Western international election observation missions (EOMs). Yet, contemporary international election observation is a complex regime populated by a panoply of organizations from different regions, with different sponsors and sharply varying professionalism. Many countries now host multiple EOMs which may disagree in their verdicts about election quality. What does this mean for post-election mobilization and violence? We theorize two alternative possibilities about the effect of multiple EOMs on post-election violence, based on an expanded view of which EOMs may influence local actors' beliefs. First, drawing insight from the theory of motivated reasoning---whereby partisans are swayed by information that supports their side---it may be that countervailing verdicts from different EOMs serves to foment and exacerbate two-sided violence. Alternatively, if citizens attach weight to the verdicts of multiple groups, we should expect that countervailing verdicts will increase uncertainty about electoral quality and dampen post-election violence. We explore these hypotheses using new, detailed data on EOM verdicts that covers a large number of Western- and non-Western observer groups, combined with fine-grained data on election violence and its perpetrators. We employ multiple methods to guard against the endogeneity of election observation, and implement a sub-national test to explore implications of our argument.