Abstract
This article introduces the Deadly Electoral Conflict dataset (DECO): a global, georeferenced event dataset on electoral violence with lethal outcomes from 1989 to 2017. DECO allows for empirical evaluation of theories relating to the timing, location, and dynamics of deadly electoral violence. By clearly distinguishing electoral violence from related (and sometimes concurrent) instances of organized violence, DECO is particularly suitable for investigating how election-related violence is connected to other forms of violent political contention. In the article, we present the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the data collection and discuss empirical patterns that emerge in DECO. We also demonstrate one potential use of DECO by examining the association between United Nations peacekeeping forces and the prevalence of deadly electoral violence in conflict-affected countries.
Highlights
Almost all countries in the world hold elections to fill the highest office of the state
To examine how UN peacekeepers influence the risk of electoral violence, we identify electoral violence as a particular subset of all political violence recorded in the UCDP GED
Deadly Electoral Conflict (DECO) equips scholars with data that can advance knowledge on important questions related to the causes, dynamics, and consequences of electoral violence that to date have been difficult to study systematically
Summary
Almost all countries in the world hold elections to fill the highest office of the state. A clear advantage of these sources is their comprehensive time series, which allow global comparisons across different electoral regime types, for example, or analyses of how changes to institutional features affect electoral violence Both V-Dem and NELDA variables provide nuance in terms of the intensity and scope of the violence, they do not allow for more fine-grained temporally or spatially disaggregated analyses beyond the level of the country-year or electoral round.. Our ambition to produce a global event dataset on electoral violence from 1989 forward is attainable to a large extent because we can utilize UCDP to identify candidate events for inclusion and focus our own coding efforts on assessing the substantive link between each event and the electoral contest and to add qualitative information about each event This limitation comes with specific advantages in terms of allowing us greater spatial and temporal coverage, as described later in the article. While ECAV has undertaken the important task of including “additional information on coding decisions for each country experiencing a UCDP armed conflict” and provide the names of identified UCDP actors (Daxecker, Amicarelli, and Jung 2019, 717-718), there is no straightforward way to compare events across the two data sources
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call