Explaining Electoral Violence in Serbia: fsQCA Analysis of Contentious Behavior in the Electoral Arena

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on an analysis of incidents of electoral violence in Serbia in the period of 1990–2014. The main objective is to identify potential sources of contentious behavior in the electoral arena and, using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), to select potential causal paths that can explain it. Theoretical discussion combined with the original data collected from OSCE monitoring reports open a space for the systematic assessment of the explanatory power of various arguments concerning electoral violence while discussing its sources and logic. The fsQCA analysis identifies two causal paths that explain the occurrence of the phenomenon in the country covering Milošević and the post-Milošević era.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratization
• Election
• Serbia
• Violence

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Věra Stojarová and the anonymous reviewer for their suggestions and comments.

Funding

This research is supported by the Masaryk University research grant “Aktuální problémy politologického výzkumu II” MUNI/A/1110/2015 and Jan Hus Foundation Scholarship.

Notes

^1. Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Simon Hug, “Elections and Ethnic Civil War,” Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 3 (2012): 387–417; Benjamin Reilly, “Post-War Elections : Uncertain Turning Points of Transition,” in From War to Democracy: Dilemmas of Peacebuilding, edited by Anna K. Jarstad and Timothy D. Sisk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 159.

^2. Dawn Brancati and Jack L. Snyder, “Time to Kill: The Impact of Election Timing on Postconflict Stability,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 57, no. 5 (2012): 822–53; Staffan Lindberg, Democratization by Elections: A New Mode of Transition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

^3. Timothy D. Sisk, “Elections in Fragile States: Between Voice and Violence,” International Studies Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, March 24–28, 2008; Kristine Höglund, “Electoral Violence in Conflict-ridden Societies: Concepts, Causes, and Consequences,” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 3 (2009): 412–27.

^4. Pippa Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

^5. IFES, “Election, Violence, Education and Resolution: Theoretical Framework,” 2011, http://www.ifes.org/Content/Projects/Applied-Research-Center/Cross-Cutting/Election-Violence-Education-and-Resolution/Nav/About/Framework.aspx; UNDP, Elections and Conflict Prevention Guide (New York: Bureau for Development Policy, 2009).

^6. Pippa Norris, Richard W. Frank, and Ferran Martínez i Coma, Contentious Elections: From Ballots to Barricades (New York: Routledge, 2015).

^7. Timothy D. Sisk, “Evaluating Election-related Violence: Nigeria and Sudan in Comparative Perspective,” in Voting in Fear: Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Dorina Bekoe (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2012), 39–74; Scott Straus and Charlie Taylor, “Democratization and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1990–2007,” Conference Paper for 2009 Annual Meeting of APSA, 2009, 1–40.

^8. Straus and Taylor, “Democratization and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1990–2007”; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters.

^9. On Serbia, see Vladimir Goati, Elections in FRY from 1990 to 1998, Addendum: Elections 2000 (Belgrade: Centre for Free Elections and Democracy, 2001); Slaviša Orlović, Partije I Izbori U Srbiji: 20 Godina (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa, 2011); Slaviša Orlović, Comparative Analysis of Democratic Performances of the Parliaments of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa, 2012); Slaviša Orlović, Izbori I Formiranje Vlade U Srbiji 2012 (Belgrade: Čigoja štampa, 2012).

^10. An exception in this context is the 2000 federal presidential election that was accompanied by demonstrations against Slobodan Milošević with the epicenter in Belgrade, Serbia.

^11. UNDP, Elections and Conflict Prevention Guide; IFES, “Election, Violence, Education, and Resolution: Theoretical Framework.”

^12. Louis Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts from Escalation to Resolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

^13. Openness, healthy competitiveness; acceptance of the outcome; cf. Sisk, “Elections in Fragile States: Between Voice and Violence,” 3.

^14. Rafael Lopez-Pintor, “Reconciliation Elections: A Post–Cold War Experience,” in Rebuilding Societies after Civil War: Critical Roles for International Assistance, edited by Krishna Kumar (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997), 43–61.

^15. Daniela Donno, “Elections and Democratization in Authoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 3 (2013): 703–16; Andreas Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006).

^16. The outcome may be the result of several different combinations of conditions. Usually, these alternate paths are treated as logically equivalent; Charles C. Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 54.

^17. This represents a situation in which the selfsame condition leads to a different end-effect (outcome).

^18. Asymmetric causality refers to a situation in which the proportion of Xs that are also Ys need not be the same as the proportion of Ys that are also Xs.

^19. See more in Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry.

^20. See Höglund, “Electoral Violence in Conflict-ridden Societies: Concepts, Causes, and Consequences”; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Patrick M. Kuhn, “Do Contentious Elections Trigger Violence?” in Contentious Elections: From Ballots to Barricades, edited by Pippa Norris, Richard W. Frank, and Ferran Martínez i Coma (New York: Routledge, 2015); UNDP, Elections and Conflict Prevention Guide.

^21. Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 2 (1991): 12–34; compare Höglund, “Electoral Violence in Conflict-ridden Societies.”

^22. John Hickman, “Is Electoral Violence Effective? Evidence from Sri Lanka’s 2005 Presidential Election,” Contemporary South Asia 17, no. 4 (2009): 429–35; Kristine Höglund and Anton Piyarathne, “Paying the Price for Patronage: Electoral Violence in Sri Lanka,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 47, no. 3 (2009): 287–307; Catherine Boone, “Politically Allocated Land Rights and the Geography of Electoral Violence: The Case of Kenya in the 1990s,” Comparative Political Studies 44, no. 10 (2011): 1311–42; Dorina Bekoe, ed., Voting in Fear: Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2012).

^23. Votes and Violence Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

^24. “Election Violence in Democratizing States,” APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper, 2011.

^25. “When Do Governments Resort to Election Violence?” British Journal of Political Science 44, no. 1 (2013): 149–79.

^26. “Perils of Pluralism: Electoral Violence and Competitive Authoritarianism in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Working Paper, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012.

^27. Kuhn, “Do Contentious Elections Trigger Violence?”

^28. See more in Norris, Frank, and Martínez i Coma, Contentious Elections: From Ballots to Barricades; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters.

^29. Goati, Elections in FRY from 1990 to 1998, Addendum: Elections 2000; James Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos State Violence in Serbia and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

^30. Daniel Bochsler, “No Title The Party System of Serbia,” in Party Politics in Western Balkans, edited by Věra Stojarová and Peter Emerson (New York: Routledge, 2010), 99–118.

^31. Goati, Elections in FRY from 1990 to 1998, Addendum: Elections 2000.

^32. Timothy Edmunds, “Illiberal Resilience in Serbia,” Journal of Democracy 20, no. 1 (2008): 128–42.

^33. Goati, Elections in FRY from 1990 to 1998, Addendum: Elections 2000, 45; Ola Listhaug, Sabrina P. Ramet, and Dragana Dulić, Civic and Uncivic Values Serbia the Post-Milošević Era (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011).

^34. OSCE, “Elections in Serbia.”

^35. Bojan Todosijević, Politics of World Views: Ideology and Political Behavior in Serbia 1990–2002 (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008).

^36. Goati, Elections in FRY from 1990 to 1998, Addendum: Elections 2000; James Dawson, Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

^37. Svetozar Stojanović, Serbia: The Democratic Revolution (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003); Jessica Greenberg, After the Revolution Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

^38. Compare Höglund, “Electoral Violence in Conflict-ridden Societies.”

^39. Compare Patrick H. Tolan, “Understanding Violence,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression, edited by Daniel J. Flannery, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, and Irwin D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5–18; Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Mary R Jackman, “Violence in Social Life,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 387–415; WHO, Violence: A Public Health Priority (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1996).

^40. Compare Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1978); Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); WHO, “Collective Violence—Facts,” 2002; Earl Conteh-Morgan, Collective Political Violence an Introduction to the Theories and Cases of Violent Conflicts (New York: Routledge, 2004).

^41. E.g., street clashes, riots, violent dispersal of protests; compare Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, 13; Conteh-Morgan, “Collective Political Violence an Introduction to the Theories and Cases of Violent Conflicts”; WHO, “Collective Violence—Facts.”

^42. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); Robert A. Dahl, Regimes and Oppositions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1950).

^43. In terms of Dahl’s polyarchy; Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition.

^44. Compare Paul Brooker, Non-Democratic Regimes: Theory, Government, and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, Latin America, Hahr Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (1978); Linda J. Cook, “Eastern European Postcommunist Variants of Political Clientelism,” in Clientelism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy, edited by Diego Abente Brun and Larry J. Diamond (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 204–19.

^45. We operate with the index on the justification that it is widely used and applied in order to measure the quality of democracy, it provides a complex time series, and it can be easily interpreted. Despite the shortcomings that we are aware of, it is still one of the best options we have.

^46. E.g. competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, illiberal democracy; cf. Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism : The Dynamics of Unfree Competition; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

^47. Freedom House, “Freedom House,” 2016, https://freedomhouse.org/.

^48. Nick Stevenson, Culture and Citizenship (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001); John R. Baldwin, Sandra L. Faulkner, and Michael L. Hecht, A Moving Target: The Illusive Definition of Culture, A Moving Target: The Illusive Definition of Culture. Redefining Culture: Perspectives across the Disciplines (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006).

^49. Ragnhild Nordås, “Are Religious Conflicts Bloodier? Assessing the Impact of Religion on Civil Conflict Casualties,” 2007, 8.

^50. Stephen Calkins, “The New Merger Guidelines and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index,” California Law Review 72, no. 2 (1983): 402–29; Richard A. Miller, “Herfindahl-Hirschman Index as a Market Structure Variable: An Exposition for Antitrust Practitioners,” Antitrust Bulletin 27 (1982): 593.

^51. T. Dunning, “Fighting and Voting: Violent Conflict and Electoral Politics,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 3 (2011): 328; Wilkinson, Votes and Violence Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India, 25; Mario Chacon, James A. Robinson, and Ragnar Torvik, “When Is Democracy an Equilibrium? Theory and Evidence from Colombia’s La Violencia,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 3 (2011): 366–96.

^52. Steven D. Levitt, “How Do Senators Vote? Disentangling the Role of Voter Preferences, Party Affiliation, and Senator Ideology,” American Economic Review 86, no. 3 (1996): 425–41; Susan Stokes, “What Do Policy Switches Tell Us about Democracy?,” in Democracy, Accountability, and Representation, edited by Adam Przeworski, Susan Stokes, and Bernard Manin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 125.

^53. Vincent Barnett, Marx (London: Routledge, 2009); Michael D’Amore and John T. Ishiyama, “Marxism,” in 21st Political Science. A Reference Handbook, edited by John. T. Ishiyama and Marijke Breuning (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011), 651.

^54. FAO, “Inequality Analysis. The Gini Index. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,” 2006; World Bank, “Data. The World Bank,” 2016, http://data.worldbank.org/; World Income Inequality Database, “World Income Inequality Database V3.0b,” 2014, http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/WIID3-0B/en_GB/database/.

^55. David Churchman, Why We Fight: The Origins, Nature, and Management of Human Conflict (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013); Fathali M. Moghaddam, The New Global Insecurity: How Terrorism, Environmental Collapse, Economic Inequalities, and Resource Shortages Are Changing Our World (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2010).

^56. Carsten Schneider and Claudius Wagemann, Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences: A Guide to Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 120–21.

^57. Ibid., 57.

^58. Ibid.

^59. cf. ibid., 279.

^60. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science, 296.

^61. See more in Ragin, Redesigning Social Inquiry: Fuzzy Sets and beyond; Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science; Schneider and Wagemann, Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences: A Guide to Qualitative Comparative Analysis, 157–77.

^62. Carles Boix, “Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World,” World Politics 60, no. 3 (June 13, 2011): 390–437; Carles Boix, “Origins and Persistence of Economic Inequality,” Annual Review of Political Science 13, no. 1 (2010): 489–516; Halvard Buhaug et al., “It’s the Local Economy, Stupid! Geographic Wealth Dispersion and Conflict Outbreak Location,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 5 (2011): 814–40.

^63. Charles C. Ragin, “Set Relations in Social Research: Evaluating Their Consistency and Coverage,” Political Analysis 14, no. 3 (2006): 299.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Masaryk University research grant “Aktuální problémy politologického výzkumu II” MUNI/A/1110/2015 and Jan Hus Foundation Scholarship.