Abstract
In this chapter, Buttorff discusses elections and boycotts in the 12 Arab countries that held elections between 1990 and 2010, as well as the common patterns of boycott and participation regularly observed in the Arab world. She also provides an overview of the reasons for boycotting expressed by the opposition parties themselves. Finally, using cross-national data on opposition boycotts as well as electoral fairness indicators, Buttorff explores the strengths and limits of existing scholarship in explaining the variation in the boycotting behavior of opposition groups in the region.
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Notes
- 1.
Comment on the 2016 Moroccan parliamentary elections from Islamist and leftist boycotting groups. Al-Ashraf, H. (6 September 2016). ‘Muqta’at al-intikhabat al-magrebiya tajma’a yasaryeen wa islamyeen.’ Al Araby. Retrieved from https://www.alaraby.co.uk/politics/3af87186-e46a-4363-99da-0959d5911537.
- 2.
Beaulieu (2014) refers to election boycotts in which all opposition parties choose not to participate as unified boycotts.
- 3.
Al-Farsi (2013). See also http://archive.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/arc/2378_07.htm for more information on how electors were selected (Inter-Parliamentary Union. 2008. “Majles A’Shura – Elections in 2007”).
- 4.
A former member of al-Wifaq, Hassan Mushayma founded Haq in 2005. According to Wehrey (2014), Mushayma led a hardline faction within al-Wifaq before defecting with others over disputes about strategy and participation in particular. He notes, “Well before 2005, tensions were brewing in al-Wifaq’s ranks, between clerics and seasoned lay activists of the intifada. It is likely that the decision to form Haq was as much of a result of these cleric-lay tensions as it was a dispute over political strategy and the merits of boycotting or participating” (see “The Rise of the Rejectionists: Haq and Its Allies”).
- 5.
Tamani, ‘FFS et RCD opposes aux elections,’ El Watan, 14 February 2002, p. 2. Faouzia Ababsa, ‘FFS rejette le processus electoral,’ La Tribune, 30 March 2002, Front Page. Faouzia Ababsa, ‘Le RCD dans la logique du rejet des elections legislatives,’ La Tribune, 7 March 2002, Front Page.
- 6.
For more information about this dataset, including the raw data and codebook, see http://hyde.research.yale.edu/nelda/. See also Norris (2014) and Donno (2013) for the use of the NELDA variables to measure electoral fairness. Another common measure of electoral fairness/malpractice is election observers’ assessments of electoral fraud. The problem with using observer assessments of fraud to examine the relationship with boycotts is the potential impact of a boycott on domestic and international observers’ assessments of whether the elections were in fact fraudulent (see Beaulieu 2006, p. 17; Bratton 1998).
- 7.
According to Hyde and Marinov, “If at least some opposition leaders announced and carried out a public boycott of the election, a ‘Yes’ was coded. If not, a ‘No’ was coded.” Calls for boycotts from banned opposition are excluded from this variable (coded as “N/A”).
- 8.
For Arab elections, missing data in the NELDA dataset for whether the election was boycotted in Algeria (1991) and Oman (2007) were filled in according to my own data. See Table 2.5 for the discrepancy between my own categorization of boycotted elections in the Arab world and Hyde & Marinov’s coding.
- 9.
Table 2.5 presents this information for all 12 Arab countries for each election held between 1990 and 2010.
- 10.
- 11.
(2014, October 11). The Bahraini opposition declares boycott of legislative elections. Al Jazeera. Retrieved from http://www.aljazeera.net/news/arabic/2014/10/11/.
- 12.
Morocco used a majoritarian electoral system for two of its legislative elections (1993 and 1997). Algeria also used a majoritarian electoral system for its legislative elections in 1991.
- 13.
An examination of Beaulieu’s (2014) data, which covers elections between 1975 and 2006 in developing countries, similarly reveals no significant relationship between election type and boycotts: 11.17 percent (41 of 367) of legislative elections and 10.20 percent (40 of 392) of presidential elections were boycotted. Beaulieu’s data is available from http://blog.as.uky.edu/beaulieu/?page_id=12.
- 14.
There were of course some exceptions, such as the changes discussed previously to the electoral systems in Algeria and Jordan.
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Appendix
Appendix
Table 2.5 presents the NELDA electoral fairness indicators for elections in the 12 Arab electoral autocracies discussed in this chapter. In addition, the table displays whether the election was boycotted according to (1) the NELDA dataset and (2) my own collection and coding of elections in the 12 Arab electoral autocracies.
Information on the electoral fairness indicators as well as the coding of boycotted elections according to NELDA can be found here: http://hyde.research.yale.edu/nelda/. For NELDA’s boycott variable (nelda14), “N/A” was coded if either the opposition was banned or if there was no opposition at all.
The data I collected on boycotts between 1990 and 2008 for all elections, both democratic and authoritarian, were gathered using Keesing’s Record of World Events. This record is published monthly, with a specific entry for each individual country in a particular month. The dataset includes both parliamentary and presidential elections, but I excluded presidential referenda. Because presidential referenda are excluded, I denote “N/A” for these elections in Table 2.5. An election was coded as boycotted if a political party or organization called for a boycott of the election. The emphasis was placed on an organized call for a boycott to differentiate between voter abstention and decisions taken by opposition groups (the interest of this book). Thus, only those elections in which there was a clear call to boycott the election by an opposition party or group are considered boycotted in the dataset. The original dataset (1990–2008) was checked and updated through 2010 for the 12 Arab electoral autocracies using LexisNexis news sources and Google search engine.
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Buttorff, G.J. (2019). Explaining Election Boycotts. In: Authoritarian Elections and Opposition Groups in the Arab World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92186-0_2
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