Rapid: The Impact of Domestic Election Observers on Electoral Violence, Integrity , and Voting Behavior

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This study leverages a unique opportunity to randomly assign election observers to a sample of over 1,000 of Ghana's 21,000 polling places during the country's December 2012 general elections. With the direct collaboration of the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO), Ghana's most prominent domestic observation group, and CODEO's secretariat, the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), the project's random assignment of a large subset of election observers permits causal estimates of the effects of observers on electoral violence and voter intimidation. The project compares outcomes at polling places located in constituencies with a high concentration of observers to outcomes at polling places in constituencies with a low concentration of observers. These comparisons will yield direct policy implications with respect to the optimal and most cost effective deployments of observers in future elections. The intellectual merit of this project lies with how it advances understanding of political violence and intimidation. If election observers are effective, as donors and civil society groups believe, their presence at a polling place will generate a noticeable reduction in violence and intimidation. The data collected will allow estimations of the size of this effect. In addition, reductions in violence can also be used to estimate the impact of violence and intimidation on a range of other relevant outcomes. These include voter turnout, the political participation of women and other vulnerable groups, the extent of electoral support for incumbent legislators, and citizen perceptions of the election's legitimacy. The project will also produce a publicly-available micro-level dataset with which to test theories about where violence is most likely to occur. The project will have broad impact on the placement of election observers in countries whose elections have histories of violence and intimidation. It will be the first to experimentally study the impact of election observers on violence and intimidation. The findings will yield direct policy implications regarding the optimal geo-spatial and numerical deployment of observers for future observer missions.