Electoral Violence Prevention:What Works?

<p>Elections are in theory democratic means of resolving disputes and making collective decisions, yet too often force is employed to distort the electoral process. The post-Cold War increase in the number of electoral authoritarian and hybrid states has brought this problem into relief. In recent years the prevention of electoral violence has played an increasingly large role in the democratic assistance activities undertaken by international agencies, following increased awareness within the international community of the specific security challenges that elections entail. However, there has to date been little systematic evaluation of the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions so as to enable them to maintain the peace during the electoral period. This article assesses the effectiveness of two common types of international EVP activity. Using a new global dataset of EVP strategies between 2003 and 2015, this article finds evidence that capacity-building strategies reduce violence by non-state actors, whereas attitude-transforming strategies are associated with a reduction in violence by state actors and their allies. The findings are relevant both for understanding the dynamics of electoral violence, and also for policymakers and electoral assistance providers in the international community who have responsibility for the design of democratic assistance projects in states at risk of electoral violence.</p

Left, Right, and Center: Strategic Information Acquisition and Diversity in Judicial Panels

In the last fifteen years, a number of empirical studies of multi-member judicial panels have documented a phenomenon popularly known as &quot;panel effects. &quot; Two principal findings of this literature are: (1) the inclusion (non-pivotal) members from outside the dominant ideology on the panel predicts higher reversal rates of administrative agencies that are “like minded ” with the panel’s median voter; and (2) when mixed panels do not reverse, they frequently issue unanimous decisions. These apparently moderating effects of mixed panel composition pose a challenge to conven-tional median voter theory. In the face of this challenge, many scholars have offered their own explanation for panel effects (including collegial-ity; deliberation effects, whistle-blowing, and others). In this paper, we propose a general model that (among other things) predicts panel effects as a byproduct of strategic information acquisition. The kernel of our argument is that (non-pivotal) minority members of mixed panels have incentives to engage in costly searches for information in cases where the majority members would rationally choose not to do so. As a result, the inclusion of ideologically diverse members may induce more information production in a way that increases the likelihood that a mixed panel will overturn ideologically allied agency actors. Our informational account — if true — has normative implications for the composition of judicial panels in particular, and for deliberative groups more generally