Stealing an Election: Violence or Fraud?

Political actors often resort to electoral violence to gain an edge over their competitors even though violence is harder to hide than fraud and more likely to delegitimize elections as a result. Existing explanations tend to analyze violence in terms of the same factors as fraud, or to treat violence as a means of last resorts given its overtness. We introduce a novel explanation that does neither, arguing that political actors often use violence for the very reason that it is hard to hide. Its overtness, we argue, allows political actors to observe whether the agents they enlist to manipulate elections for them do so and reduces these agents’ likelihood of shirking in turn. We develop our argument through a formal model showing that electoral monitors, by exacerbating problems of moral hazard (shirking), can induce actors to increasingly turn to violence and use process tracing to examine the implications of this model through the example of Egypt.