Stephanie Burchard, Ph.D.
sburchar@ida.org
Institute for Defense Analyses
Country: United States (Virginia)
Research Interests
African Politics
Comparative Political Institutions
Elections, Election Administration, and Voting Behavior
Gender and Politics
Comparative Democratization
Conflict Processes & War
Foreign Security Assistance
Electoral Violence
Countering Violent Extremism
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Despite its reputation for global democracy promotion, the United States has developed substantial long-term military partnerships with several African countries that have less than stellar human rights records. While in some instances the United States has chosen to rebuke countries for human rights abuses, it has also elected to continue security partnerships with others in the face of similarly credible accusations. To explain this seeming inconsistency, this article analyzes U.S. security partnerships with six African countries: Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, and Kenya, finding that a combination of intensity of interest and magnitude of the violation explains when the United States chooses to censure those countries, when it does not, and the intensity of the rebuke. Countries where the United States has significant interest are most often exempted from censure. The comparative weight of interests to values determines the U.S. response to norm violations. Constructivist principal–agent theory explains this finding in terms of a struggle within the U.S. security establishment in which those who believe offending African militaries can be improved through continuous engagement and training wield more influence in security assistance policy than those who assert that the United States should disengage from those militaries and sanction them.
Politicians often foment violence before elections to reduce competitiveness and, hence, increase their chances of winning. Given that fear and intimidation may be used to prevent voters from casting their ballots, many case studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, suggest that electoral violence has a suppressive effect on voter turnout. However, until now there has been no large-scale, multi-year analysis on the effect of pre-election violence on one of its primary targets, voter turnout. Looking across sub-Saharan Africa, and more specifically at Kenya, this article examines the influence of pre-election violence on voter turnout and finds, in the aggregate, no significant effect. Nevertheless, electoral violence may be used to depress turnout, to mobilize supporters, or to punish victors. It is a persistent trend in sub-Saharan Africa and one that threatens to undermine democratic development.
This paper examines the expectations and realities of the influence of the US-based Kenyan diaspora during the lead up to the 2013 Kenyan elections. The 2013 Kenyan elections, important to a number of domestic and international actors, could have proved a galvanizing event for the diaspora: the international community had identified Kenya at elevated risk for electoral violence, substantial changes to domestic institutions were undertaken following the high profile 2007–2008 post-election violence, and there had been considerable discussion of engaging the diaspora since the last election. Despite the superior economic power of the Kenyan diaspora compared to other African diaspora communities, we find that the Kenyan diaspora did not play a significant role in the organization or outcome of these elections. The result appears counter-intuitive, as the diaspora is financially powerful and garners significant attention from political leaders. Instead, we find that the Kenyan diaspora did not politicize its remittances and had greater influence in other sectors like economic development. The case of the Kenyan diaspora shows that it is important to understand the source, limitations, and political dynamics impacting diaspora groups; the amount of money they send home or the attention these groups receive in domestic politics is not always a good indicator of their political strength
Election-related violence, because it is meant to coerce voters, may have an adverse effect on individual attitudes towards elections—and towards democracy in general. Victims of election violence may come to associate voting with conflict, which may in turn translate into lower levels of support for democratic processes and an unwillingness to participate in future elections. This may be especially true when repeated instances of electoral violence take place, as has been the case in Kenya. To explore the possible relationship between electoral violence and democratic alienation, interviews were conducted in two internally displaced person (IDP) camps in Kenya: one which housed primarily government supporters and one which housed primarily opposition supporters. Among interviewees—all of whom were victims of past electoral violence—there were pronounced differences in stated willingness to vote in future elections. These differences depended on the individual’s perception of freeness and fairness of elections and whether the individual’s candidate or party of choice won or lost. Additionally, as ethnicity is an important factor in vote choice and partisan support, this translates into stark differences between ethnic groups. These findings suggest that electoral violence may have an uneven effect on democratic attitudes and participation.
Globally, there is a significant gender gap in political engagement between men and women; however, this gender gap varies both across countries and within countries over time. Previous research has argued that the inclusion of women in elite political positions encourages women’s political engagement at the citizen level—by augmenting women’s symbolic representation—and can reduce this gender gap. Using Afrobarometer data from 20 African countries across four waves of surveys from 1999 to 2008, we employ an interactive multilevel model that controls for the sex of the respondent, the percentage of women in the legislature, and the interaction of these two variables. We find that as women’s descriptive representation increases, the political engagement gender gap diminishes. This finding is robust across several measures of political engagement. Our findings suggest that the incorporation of women into political institutions encourages the political engagement of women at the citizen level.
Books Written:
After decades of experimentation with various forms of dictatorship and autocracy, most sub-Saharan African countries adopted multiparty elections in the 1990s—a development widely celebrated as a sign that the region was moving toward democracy. This embrace of elections, however, has often been accompanied by unanticipated violence, raising important questions: Are violent elections a normal part of the process in new democracies? Does the quality and conduct of elections matter for democratic consolidation? Most fundamentally, what does the persistence of electoral violence mean for the future of democracy in Africa? Addressing these questions with a combination of rigorous qualitative and quantitative approaches, Stephanie Burchard explores both the causes and consequences of electoral violence in sub-Saharan Africa.