Uneven accountability in the wake of political violence
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Thomas O’Mealia,Mai Hassan |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343317751836 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Uneven accountability in the wake
of political violence: Evidence from
Kenya’s ashes and archives
Mai Hassan
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Thomas O’Mealia
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Abstract
The government faces a principal–agent problem with lower-level state officers. Officers are often expected
to use the state coercive capacity endowed to them to politically benefit the government. But officers can
shirk from the government’s demands. An officer’s actions during bouts of large-scale and highly visible
electoral violence reveal the officer’s type, thereby providing the government with the information necessary
to solve its principal–agent problem for the future. The government holds officers who used their authority
to perpetuate incumbent-instigated violence accountable through positive rewards, while holding officers
who used their authority to perpetuate opposition-instigated violence accountable through negative sanc-
tions. We find evidence in support of the theory using micro-level archival data on 2,500 local officer
appointments and fine-grained satellite data on the locations of violence in the aftermath of Kenya’s 2007
election. The Kenyan government was more likely to fire officials whose jurisdictions saw opposition-
instigated violence that targeted government supporters. But we find the opposite result where violence was
instigated by incumbent supporters: there, officers were less likely to be fired if violence occurred in their
jurisdiction. Our results indicate that leaders can manipulate accountability processes after political violence
to further politicize the state.
Keywords
Africa, bureaucracy, coercive apparatus, electoral violence, ethnic politics, state violence
Introduction
Sanctioning local-level state and coercive officers
becomes a priority after large bouts of electoral violence.
Centrally appointed mayors, local police chiefs, and vil-
lage executives are often at the forefront of electoral vio-
lence because of their knowledge of the local community
alongside their state-endowed coercive power.
1
In turn,
domestic audiences and the international community
alike demand that the government bring local state
officers who perpetuated violence to justice.
2
These dual
imperatives are especially salient in unconsolidated
democracies which disproportionately see electoral vio-
lence (Straus & Taylor, 2012; Hafner-Burton, Hyde &
Jablonski, 2014) and are beholden to pressure from
Corresponding author:
mhass@umich.edu
1
These officers are at the forefront of political violence more broadly
(e.g. Davenport, 2005; Deng & O’Brien, 2013; Garcı
´a, 2014;
Sullivan, 2015).
2
Local state officers who perpetuated political violence are unlikely
to face international sanctioning because international tribunals
increasingly focus on prosecuting the ‘big fish’ (O’Brien, 2012).
Journal of Peace Research
2018, Vol. 55(2) 161–174
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343317751836
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