Fear of Electoral Violence and its Impact on Political Knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717742835 |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717742835
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(4) 869 –886
© The Author(s) 2017
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032321717742835
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Fear of Electoral Violence
and its Impact on Political
Knowledge in Sub-Saharan
Africa
Johanna Söderström
Abstract
The literature on electoral violence has focused on its causes as well as its scope, ignoring the
implications for citizens trying to practice their political citizenship. Informed citizens are a central
part of a functioning democracy. The emotive response to violence may play an important role
here. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of how the voter responds to violence.
Recent work on the role of emotions in politics has demonstrated its positive role for cognition,
as fear can increase the individual’s propensity to amass information and reevaluate attitudes and
behavior. This is tested in a hitherto unexamined context, namely, Sub-Saharan Africa, using the
Afrobarometer survey (20 different countries). In general, political fear is a significant predictor
of political knowledge, but in the opposite direction compared to the hypothesis. The affective
intelligence hypothesis only receives partial support using this data, namely, in countries with high
levels of political violence.
Keywords
political knowledge, fear, violence, elections, Sub-Saharan Africa
Accepted: 27 October 2017
Introduction
The ability of citizens to participate in elections and make considered judgments is crucial
for holding elected representatives accountable, but also in terms of forward-looking elec-
toral decisions. Informed voters are central to the workings of democracy, as captured by
the emphasis put on “enlightened understanding” by Dahl (1989). Recent research has
demonstrated that uninformed voters make different evaluations of candidates and parties,
and in the long run make different choices during elections as they have a harder time
translating their preferences at the poll (Fowler and Margolis, 2014; Singh and Roy, 2014).
This suggests that political knowledge is central to whether or not the outcome of an
Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
Corresponding author:
Johanna Söderström, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, 5020 Bergen, Norway.
Email: johanna.soderstrom@statsvet.uu.se
742835PSX0010.1177/0032321717742835Political StudiesSöderström
research-article2017
Article
870 Political Studies 66(4)
election reflects the will of the people. To put it bluntly, political knowledge matters for the
realization of democracy. If political knowledge is unequally distributed between groups
in society, and recent work suggests that there are systematic differences in the distribution
of political knowledge (Fowler and Margolis, 2014: 109; see also Jennings, 1996: 229),
this is worrisome. Political knowledge and cognitive capacities are important as a resource
that enables political participation in general and matter for the functioning of democracy
in several ways (Verba et al., 1995: 304–333; Knight and Johnson, 1997: 299).
This article argues that one context where these questions are brought to the fore is the
context of violence. Not all groups in society are equally exposed to violence when it does
occur, which could result in further unequal distribution of political knowledge if vio-
lence is found to impact levels of political knowledge. Homicide rates in Africa are more
than double the global average and 36% of the homicides in the world took place in Africa
in 2010 (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 2011: 11), and the high-
est global rate of major assault is also found in West, Central, and Southern Africa even if
data are scarce (Harrendorf et al., 2010: 22). Particularly relevant to a voter should be
violence occurring in relation to elections, or political violence more generally. The expe-
rience of electoral violence is widespread in Africa, and many elections are characterized
by harassment, intimidation, destruction of property, assaults, deaths, and displacement
especially in the period leading up to the election (Bekoe, 2012; Bratton, 2008; Dercon
and Gutiérrez-Romero, 2012; Höglund, 2009; Inokoba and Maliki, 2011). Based on the
African Electoral Violence Dataset (AEVD),1 electoral violence is a regular occurrence
for nearly half the countries included in the dataset, and about 20% of the elections
resulted in severe levels of violence (Bekoe, 2012: 8; Straus and Taylor, 2012: 17).
Research pertaining to electoral violence has not paid attention to how it impacts the voter
and her ability to practice her citizenship, nor consequences in general of electoral vio-
lence (see, for example, Bekoe, 2012; Collier and Vicente, 2014; Dercon and Gutiérrez-
Romero, 2012; Dunning, 2011; Fjelde and Höglund, 2014; Guelke, 2001; Hafner-Burton
et al., 2014; Hickman, 2009; Höglund, 2009; Straus and Taylor, 2012; Wilkinson, 2004;
note, however, one exception, Getmansky and Zeitzoff, 2014). This article attempts to
rectify this, by examining whether violence can impact levels of political knowledge, in
particular through the emotional response induced by political violence.
Recently, however, there has been an effort to understand how violence in general
influences politics, both at the macro-level and at the micro-level. For instance, some
works examine the history of war and its influence on the ensuing party system and elec-
toral performance of former warring parties (see, for example, Ishiyama, 2014; Ishiyama
and Widmeier, 2013; Levitsky and Way, 2012; Sindre, 2014). Vera Mironova and Sam
Whitt (2016: 2) note that “researchers are increasingly examining the impact of violence
on micro-level norms and preferences,” but that the impact of violence is mixed so far.
Within this field, there is great variation in terms of what specific violence is studied, as
well as what norms, preferences, or micro-level behavior are studied. For instance, a
recent study finds that mass uprisings or colored revolutions lead to a decrease in trust
(Ishiyama and Pechenina, 2016). In a study of Kenya, the authors examined whether
violence hardens ethnic identities, but they were unable to demonstrate such effects, even
when considering the frequency of the violence, its intensity, or the specific group
involved in the act (Ishiyama et al., 2016). In contrast, Mironova and Whitt (2016) do find
that cues related to in- and outgroup matter for how violence shapes social norms. What
is clear is that the political consequences of violence are a new and expanding field of
research, and that the consequences thus far are both varied and sometimes surprising.
To continue reading
Request your trial