How Strategic Violence Distorts African Elections

Abstract: While violence is a common occurrence in African elections, most attention has been focused only on a handful of cases with extreme levels of fatal election violence. Not only are these cases unrepresentative of the African continent as a whole, but focusing narrowly on these cases is also misleading when trying to understand the broader role that electoral violence plays in contemporary African democracies. Far more pervasive is the non-fatal type of low-scale election violence, which has become a common form of electoral manipulation in African elections. While low-scale violence does not threaten national security, it is an effective form of manipulation with less severe consequences for perpetrating parties. The insidious effects of low-scale violence on political participation and the quality of elections are demonstrated in Zambia, where fear of violence has come to seriously erode the quality of democracy.