Fraud Is What People Make of It: Election Fraud, Perceived Fraud, and Protesting in Nigeria

DOI10.1177/0022002718824636
Date01 October 2019
AuthorJessica Di Salvatore,Andrea Ruggeri,Ursula Daxecker
Published date01 October 2019
Subject MatterArticles
Article
Fraud Is What People
Make of It: Election
Fraud, Perceived Fraud,
and Protesting in Nigeria
Ursula Daxecker
1
, Jessica Di Salvatore
2
,
and Andrea Ruggeri
3
Abstract
Why do fraudulent elections encourage protesting? Scholars suggest that informa-
tion about fraud shapes individuals’ beliefs and propensity to protest. Yet these
accounts neglect the complexity of opinion formation and have not been tested at
the individual level. We distinguish between the mobilizing effects of actual incidents
of election fraud and individuals’ subjective perceptions of fraud. While rational
updating models would imply that both measures similarly affect mobilization, we
argue that subjective fraud perceptions are more consistent predictors of pro-
testing, also being shaped by attitudes, information, and community networks. Our
empirical analysis uses geo-referenced individual-level data on fraud events, fraud
perception, and protesting from the 2007 Nigerian elections. Our analysis yields two
main findings: proximity to reported fraud has no effect on protesting and citizens
perceiving elections as fraudulent are consistently more likely to protest, and more
so if embedded in community networks.
Keywords
election fraud, protest, fraud perceptions, election observers, Nigeria
1
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2
Department of Politics and International Studies, The University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
3
Department of Politics and International Relations, Brasenose College, University of Oxford, Oxford,
United Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Ursula Daxecker, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, PO Box 15578, 1001 NB
Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Email: u.daxecker@uva.nl
Journal of Conflict Resolution
2019, Vol. 63(9) 2098-2127
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022002718824636
journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr
Contrary to expectations of major irregularities and mass violence voiced in the run-
up to the 2015 general elections in Nigeria, the vote took place without centralized
systematic fraud and proceeded largely peacefully (European Union Election Obser-
vation Mission [EU EOM] 2015, 4, 6, 31). Opposition party candidate Muhammadu
Buhari won the presidential election, and results were quickly accepted by incum-
bent President Goodluck Jonathan, bringing about the first peaceful hand over of
power by an incumbent president in Nigerian history. In comparison, massive irre-
gularities and violence in earlier elections in 2007 and 2011 had triggered wide-
spread protests and rioting during and after the vote (EU EOM 2007, 1-3, 6, 27; EU
EOM 2011, 3, 27). At face value, this evidence suggests a link between the incidence
of election fraud and popular mobilization where elections marred by irregularities
are followed by contention, whereas the absence of large-scale manipulation pro-
duces more stable and peaceful outcomes. The political science literature largely
confirms such a link between electoral manipulation, on the one hand, and nonvio-
lent and violent collective protest, on the other, suggesting that election fraud
induces grievances and reveals information to citizens that combine to facilitate
various types of collective action (Kuntz and Thompson 2009; Tucker 2007). Yet,
while theoretical arguments focus on individual-level motivations, systematic
empirical assessments have evaluated them at more aggreg ate levels (Daxecker
2012; Hyde and Marinov 2014). An aggregate analysis, though useful for highlight-
ing general patterns, is limited in evaluating whether those engaging in postelection
collective action are motivated by o bjective (i.e., experience or info rmation) or
subjective (i.e., perception) evaluations of electora l problems. If citizens protest
because they perceive elections as fraudulent rather than because they have received
information about fraud in their vicinity, the relationship between election fraud and
protesting could be subject to a variety of confounding factors such as partisanship
or other biases. While knowing whether fraud perceptions, actual events, or both
motivate citizens’ decision to protest is crucial for scholarship and policy, these
issues remain largely unexplored.
Figure 1 shows correlations in citizens’ protest participation, perceived electoral
fraud, and fraud reported by international observers in recent African elections.
1
To
create the figure, we aggregate da ta on fraud perceptions and protes ting for all
countries surveyed in Afrobarometer rounds 1 (1999 to 2001), 3 (2005), and 4
(2008) and combine them with information on fraud reported in most recent elec-
tions by monitoring organizations from the National Elections in Democracy and
Authoritarianism data (Hyde and Marinov 2012) and the Quality of Elections data
(Kelley and Kolev 2010).
2
The resulting data set includes fifty country-year obser-
vations with information on whether organizations reported election fraud, the per-
centage of respondents perceiving elections as fraudulent, and the percentage
participating in protests.
Figure 1 plots the association between fraud perception and protesting, distin-
guishing between elections with fraud reported by monitors (triangle markers) and
those without (circle markers). The dashed fitted lines show linear predictions for
Daxecker et al. 2099

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