We had an interesting talk today by “Gail Buttorff”:http://www.polisci.uiowa.edu/graduate/bio/buttorff.shtml of the University of Iowa on the subject of why opposition parties boycott elections. She presented the first formal model I’ve ever seen on the subject. Here’s the abstract:
bq. To understand both the decision to boycott an election as well as the consequences, it is necessary to account for institutions and the ideological divergence of actors, as well as the beliefs of key actors regarding the legitimacy of the regime. In this chapter, I develop an incomplete information model of election boycotts. This theoretical framework will allow me to explain how beliefs in the legitimacy of the government influence the decision to boycott elections. The model emphasizes not only the interaction between the government and the opposition parties, but also how beliefs in the legitimacy of the regime influence the decision to boycott. The model allows us to identify the conditions under which boycotts occur as well as the conditions in which they do not. In addition, the model makes predictions regarding when boycotts are successful in eliciting positive government responses such as reform.
The full paper can be “donwloaded here”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/17726/Buttorff.pdf. The presentation led to a very spirited discussion, and in particular about how to think about government legitimacy in competitive authoritarian regimes. There was also quite a lot of discussion about the role that expectations about the likelihood of opposition success in the coming election played in the decision of whether or not opposition parties should boycott elections, which the paper somewhat counter-intuitively suggested was less important than we would normally think.
I wanted to bring the paper to the attention of The Monkey Cage readers for two reasons. First, I am increasingly interested in the small but growing literature on politics in “competitive authoritarian regimes”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v013/13.2levitsky.html, and in particular in the role that elections play in these regimes (see for example the work of “Jason Brownlee”:https://webspace.utexas.edu/jmb334/www/ and “Lisa Blaydes”:http://www.stanford.edu/~blaydes/), and I will be trying to highlight more of this literature in the future. Second, I think the question of boycotts is an interesting and understudied one. Anyone who has written on the topic, I invite you to write in and share your research/findings in the comments below. For anyone considering writing on this topic, I think the Buttorff paper would be a useful read.