Intimidating voters with violence and mobilizing them with clientelism
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343318822709 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Mascha Rauschenbach,Katrin Paula |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Intimidating voters with violence
and mobilizing them with clientelism
Mascha Rauschenbach
School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim & German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval)
Katrin Paula
School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
Abstract
Recent research suggests that intimidating voters and electoral clientelism are two strategies on the menu of manip-
ulation, often used in conjunction. We do not know much, however, about who is targeted with which of these illicit
electoral strategies. This article devises and tests a theoretical argument on the targeting of clientelism and intimida-
tion across different voters. We argue that in contexts where violence can be used to influence elections, parties may
choose to demobilize swing and opposition voters, which frees up resources to mobilize their likely supporters with
clientelism. While past research on this subject has either been purely theoretical or confined to single country
studies, we offer a first systematic cross-national and multilevel analysis of clientelism and voter intimidation in seven
African countries. We analyze which voters most fear being intimidated with violence and which get targeted with
clientelistic benefits, combining new regional-level election data with Afrobarometer survey data. In a multilevel
analysis, we model the likelihood of voters being targeted with either strategy as a function of both past election
results of the region they live in and their partisan status. We find that voters living in incumbent strongholds are
most likely to report having being bribed in elections, whereas those living in opposition strongholds are most fearful
of violent intimidation. We further provide suggestive evidence of a difference between incumbent supporters and
other voters. We find support that incumbent supporters are more likely to report being targeted with clientelism,
and mixed support for the idea that they are less fearful of intimidation. Our findings allow us to define potential hot
spots of intimidation. They also provide an explanation for why parties in young democracies concentrate more
positive inducements on their own supporters than the swing voter model of campaigning would lead us to expect.
Keywords
campaigning, clientelism, electoral violence, mobilization, vote buying, young democracies
While the (re-)introduction of multiparty competition in
sub-Saharan Africa at the beginning of the 1990s
increased the responsiveness of parties to their constitu-
ents’ needs, it also heightened the stakes of winning
elections. This resulted in the widespread use of manip-
ulative strategies such as electoral clientelism, fraud, and
violence (Collier & Vicente, 2012). Evidence from
recent elections in Honduras (Global Research, 2013),
Guatemala (Gonzales-Ocantos, Kiewiet de Jonge &
Nickerson, 2015), Kenya (Gutie
´rrez Romero, 2014),
Nigeria (Bratton, 2008), Uganda (Commonwealth
Observer Group, 2008), or Zimbabwe (Zvomuya,
Roussouw & Moyo, 2008) illustrates how the same par-
ties combine manipulating electoral outcomes through
the distribution of gifts to some, with intimidating other
voters. While elections in Ghana, for example, have
largely been regarded as free, parties routinely resort to
the use of thugs (Asunka et al., forthcoming) to spread
fear during election campaigns. They also widely use
vote-buying. The then ruling NDC party, for example,
Corresponding author:
mascha.rauschenbach@deval.org
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(5) 682–696
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343318822709
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr
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