PDRI-DevLab is hosting a Fall 2023 Workshop Series featuring its staff and affiliates.

Topic: Documenting Electoral Violence: Assessing Trade-Offs in Data Collection Methodologies

Presenter: Arsène Brice Bado

Session Details: Using election monitors to identify violence during elections is frequently critiqued for being costly, politicized, and possibly ineffective. By contrast, digital platforms that crowdsource election violence reporting directly from citizens are increasingly promoted because they ostensibly sidestep the limitations associated with traditional monitoring. So, why bother with monitoring? We argue that monitoring can still improve on the detection of violence when compared to citizen crowdsourcing. To test our claims, we randomized whether areas of Côte d’Ivoire were assigned to monitoring by civil society groups in addition to citizen crowdsourcing during the 2020 presidential elections. We find that the assignment of a monitor significantly increases the likelihood of violence being reported compared to the citizen treatment alone. We further find suggestive evidence that the experience/training of monitors is correlated with a greater likelihood of issuing a report.

This session will be a workshop and participants are requested to read the paper beforehand.

For more information, reach out to pdri-devlab@sas.upenn.edu