Are former rebel parties more likely to engage in electoral violence in Africa?

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine whether former rebel parties are more likely to engage in electoral violence than other parties. Using an original data set of 236 parties in 18 countries in Sub Saharan Africa (of which 47 were former rebel groups) from 1990-2018, we find that former rebel parties in Africa are more likely to engage in electoral violence than other political parties. Further, we do find, after conducting an analysis of the Burundian case, that former rebel parties that possess “violence capital” are more likely to engage in electoral violence than other rebel groups that have less or no violence capital. We discuss the implications of these findings regarding the impact of rebel party inclusion on the post-conflict political process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We define “violence capital” as an organization’s possession of the means to conduct war, such as trained fighters and leadership (human capital) and weapons and other equipment (physical capital).

2 By “rebel party” we mean a former rebel group that participates in elections in an organized fashion— it is an identifiable political group with an official label that puts forward candidates for election (Ishiyama and Marshall 2015).

3 It should be noted that some parties have, of course, engaged in multiple instances of election violence.

4 Currently, there is a debate over whether liberation movements involved in anti-colonial struggles should be included as a rebel parties (see Ishiyama and Batta 2011; Manning and Smith 2016).

5 We do not use country level fixed effects because the data is purely cross sectional and not time series. Given this limitation we approximate controlling for country effects by clustering the standard errors by country.

6 As indicated in models 3 and 4 in Table 2, civil war intensity has a negative effect on whether rebel groups transform into political parties, as suggested by the work of Ishiyama and Widmeier, 2020).

7 Frequencies of violence by CNDD-FDD are likely underreported.

8 As part of the negotiated settlement, FNL-Palipehutu changed its name to FNL. FNL would eventually change its label again in 2020 elections to the Congress of National Liberty (CNL).