The Power of Appointment: Political Appointments, Electoral Competition and Electoral Violence in Côte d’Ivoire

ABSTRACT

Studies of electoral violence find that electoral competition accounts for why and where violence occurs. The article suggests that political appointments are used by regimes to improve their electoral performance. This has implications for patterns of competition and violence. Appointments reduce the need for electoral violence overall but incentivise competition in moderately contested opposition areas, leading to more pre-electoral violence in these areas. The article relies on newly collected data on political appointments for the 2020 elections in Cote D’Ivoire. The introduction of competition and violence in moderately competitive opposition areas, this an important corrective for work on electoral violence.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Jean Michel Agnihoul for research support and expresses gratitude to a number of undisclosed contacts in Cote d’Ivoire for insight. The article benefited from various suggestions by Caitriona Dowd and Andrea Carboni as well as Dominic Burbridge, Dan Watson, Helen Morris and Tiziana Corda. Andrew Linke, Christopher Houtkamp and Teun van der Laan gave advice on the quantitative section. Special thanks to Clionadh Raleigh for advice throughout as well as two anonymous reviewers from Civil Wars who substantially helped to improve the argumentation.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Parliamentary elections were postponed to March 2021 due to internal tensions in the regime.

2. Daxecker measures representation as the discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population.

3. Electoral violence can also displace people which in competitive areas – where small population changes can have larger consequences – is a profitable strategy (Kasara 2014).

4. Interview Journalist l’Inter, September 16, 2019 Abidjan; Interview Undisclosed Political Analyst, 12 November, 2019 Abidjan.

5. Interview FPI-Affi politician, 31 October, 2019 Abidjan; Interview Journalist, September 17, 2019.

6. Interview RHDP politician, November 6, 2019 Abidjan.

7. Interview University Lecturer, September 23, 2019 Abidjan.

8. Due to missing data on other variables 150 rather than 156 prefects were included.

9. Data was intermittently updated at a distance from March 2020 until May 2022.

10. In 2016, the RHDP was a coalition of three political parties that presented a joint list. Before the 2020 elections, (parts of) two of the three parties broke away: 17 elected MPs stayed and 44 left.

11. A research assistant with connections and a political party insider assessed the party affiliation.

12. The Effective Number of Parties (ENP) is also calculated as a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index.

13. The analysis considers the interaction between appointments and previous election outcomes.

14. e.g. 12 out of 19 of the most contested parliamentary seats (defined as less than 2.5 per cent margins) in the 2016 Ivorian elections were lost by the regime.

15. 109 departments and 14 units in Abidjan is 123. 6 were dropped due to unavailable data.

16. As an alternative to the HHI also the interaction between Appointments and ENP is explored.

17. To account for relative strength, less important individuals received a weight of a halve. See online appendix for definitions and Table I.2 and I.3 for data.

18. All coded event-data is available in an online appendix.

19. Alternative specifications of the dependent variable (e.g., standard ECAV) left results unchanged.

20. Results were controlled for Victory Margins and Malapportionment rates. Victory Margins strongly correlated with ENP (.93); Malapportionment was mildly significant but the effect washed with inclusion of ENP. ENP proved the strongest estimator.

21. The last two variables came from AidData GeoQuery (Goodman et al. 2019):

22. Status based on margin-of-victory (cf. the difference between first and second contender) for multicollinearity. Competitive: 0–10 per cent margin; Competitive minority/majority: 10–25 per cent margin.

23. Reference group; regime loyal.

24. Higher values of the Herfindahl Index indicate less competition, hence the negative sign.

25. Interview with Undisclosed Political Analyst October 7, 2019 Abidjan.

26. The RHDP also swayed the loyalty of a PDCI parliamentarian, neutralised an independent candidate and co-opted Soro’s network of COMZONEs through granting army positions.

27. Mamadou Koulibaly (of LIDER) was banned as presidential candidate.

28. e.g. similar mappings were carried out in Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone.

29. Decade-old findings on sub-national power distributions were confirmed (Boone 2003)

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [726504].

Notes on contributors

Kars de Bruijne

Kars de Bruijne is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the School of Global Studies of the University of Sussex in the ERC Consolidator grant project, VERSUS: Violence, Elites and Resilience in States under Stress. He is also a Senior Research Fellow with the Clingendael’s Conflict Research Unit and head of the Greater Sahel programme. The programme focuses on the role that local and customary authorities can play in the provision of people-centred governance and fostering stability. His academic research explores the effect of information asymmetry on political violence, how armed actors target customary authorities and how regimes seek to control subnational elites and security providers.