Not All Elections Are Created Equal: Election Quality and Civil Conflict

Research on the dangers of democratization has long warned of the potential for elections to spark civil conflict. Yet, this work has remained surprisingly isolated from the burgeoning body of research on electoral integrity. We open the “black box” of elections to theorize how variation in their quality shapes the opportunities and incentives for military conflict. We argue that electoral integrity matters by influencing perceptions about the legitimacy of political outcomes and about actors’ willingness to play by the rules. While high-quality elections should not exacerbate the risk of civil conflict, low-integrity contests foster grievances and decrease the ability of the government and opposition to make credible commitments to avert violence. We find firm support for our hypothesis: flawed presidential elections increase the risk of conflict, especially in countries with a history of civil conflict. These findings are robust to methods to address the endogeneity of elections and electoral quality.