Blood and Ballots the Effect of Violence on Voting Behavior in Iraq

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Blood and Ballots the Effect of Violence on Voting Behavior in Iraq View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Göteborgs universitets publikationer - e-publicering och e-arkiv DEPTARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE BLOOD AND BALLOTS THE EFFECT OF VIOLENCE ON VOTING BEHAVIOR IN IRAQ Amer Naji Master’s Thesis: 30 higher education credits Programme: Master’s Programme in Political Science Date: Spring 2016 Supervisor: Andreas Bågenholm Words: 14391 Abstract Iraq is a very diverse country, both ethnically and religiously, and its political system is characterized by severe polarization along ethno-sectarian loyalties. Since 2003, the country suffered from persistent indiscriminating terrorism and communal violence. Previous literature has rarely connected violence to election in Iraq. I argue that violence is responsible for the increases of within group cohesion and distrust towards people from other groups, resulting in politicization of the ethno-sectarian identities i.e. making ethno-sectarian parties more preferable than secular ones. This study is based on a unique dataset that includes civil terror casualties one year before election, the results of the four general elections of January 30th, and December 15th, 2005, March 7th, 2010 and April 30th, 2014 as well as demographic and socioeconomic indicators on the provincial level. Employing panel data analysis, the results show that Iraqi people are sensitive to violence and it has a very negative effect on vote share of secular parties. Also, terrorism has different degrees of effect on different groups. The Sunni Arabs are the most sensitive group. They change their electoral preference in response to the level of violence. 2 Acknowledgement I would first like to thank my advisor Dr. Andreas Bågenholm, a Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg for the encouragement and all the support that he provided. The door to Bågenholms’ office was always open whenever I ran into a trouble spot or had a question about my research or writing. He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but guided me in the right the direction whenever. I would also like to thank the Department of Political Science; the Quality of Government Institute who are essential part of the Master`s Programme in Political Science. I would also like to thank my colleagues from my internship at the Quality of Government Institute for their wonderful collaboration and the great support. The internship at QOG helped me greatly to develop my idea and to not lose my faith in the idea due to the lack of fata. Without their passionate support and input, this thesis could not have been successfully conducted. I would also like to express my gratitude to United Nation Mission Assistant in Iraq, UN Development Program, High Independent Electoral Commission in Iraq, Central Statistical Organization in Iraq, Iraq Body Count, Empirical Studies of Conflict, Gulf 2000 Project Professor Jacob N. Shapiro, and PH.D. Mehrdad Izady for providing me with all necessary data to conduct this research, without them this work would never been existed. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my family and to my friends for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. Thank you. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 6 2. PREVIOUS LITERATURE ON TERRORISM AND VOTING ....................................................... 9 2.1 Previous Literature on Terrorism and Elections ............................................................................ 9 2.2 Literature on Terrorism and Elections in Iraq ............................................................................. 12 3. THEORETICAL APPROACH ......................................................................................................... 15 3.1 Violence and Politicization of Ethno-Religious Identities .......................................................... 15 3.2 Hypothesis ................................................................................................................................... 20 4. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS OF ANALYSIS .............................................................. 21 4.1 The Case of Iraq: Heterogeneity, Violence and Elections ........................................................... 21 4.2 Panel Data Analysis and Official Statistics ................................................................................. 24 4.3 Data Selection and Method of Collection ................................................................................... 25 4.3.1 Independent Variable: Data on Civil Casualties ................................................................... 26 4.3.3 Control variables ...................................................................................................................... 29 4.4 The Limitation of the Selected Data ............................................................................................ 31 4.5 Operationalization and Specifications of the Models .................................................................. 32 5. EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS ................................................................................................................. 35 5.1 Voting Behavior in Iraq ............................................................................................................... 35 5.2 Regression Analysis .................................................................................................................... 38 6. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 43 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 46 7.1 Primary Resources ....................................................................................................................... 46 7.2 Secondary Resources ................................................................................................................... 46 8.APPENDICES .................................................................................................................................... 52 Appendix 1. Ethnoreligious Groups Distribution .............................................................................. 52 Appendix 2. level of turnout according to ethnoreligious affiliation. ............................................... 52 Appendix 3. Administrative map of Iraq ........................................................................................... 53 Appendix 4. Ethnoreligious composition of Iraq .............................................................................. 53 Appendix 5. Ethnoreligious affiliation of the Iraqi provinces ........................................................... 54 Appendix 6. Political parties in Iraq .................................................................................................. 54 Appendix 7. Election results January 30, 2005 ................................................................................. 55 Appendix 8. Election results December 15, 2005 ............................................................................. 56 Appendix 9. Election results March 7, 2010 ..................................................................................... 56 Appendix 10. Election results April 30, 2014 ................................................................................... 57 Appendix 11. Iraq’s constitutional referendum, October 2005 ......................................................... 57 Appendix 12. Ethno-religious affiliation and turnout (%) of the parliamentary elections ................ 58 Appendix 13. “Stata” Do-File ........................................................................................................... 58 4 Tables and figures Figure 1: Mechanism of voting behavior .............................................................................................. 19 Figure 2: Level of civilian causalities in all over Iraq from 2003 to 2015 ............................................ 23 Figure 3: violence and secular voting in Iraq ........................................................................................ 37 Figure 4: Regression analysis, terror casualties and secular voting ...................................................... 38 Figure 5: Bivariate scatterplots from a random effect model of violence and secular voting. .............. 40 Table 1: Preparators and weapons used in murdering the Iraqi civilians…………………….27 Table 2: Ethnic and religious groups in Iraq ....................................................................................... 340 Table 3: Statistical Summary of the Data ........................................................................................... 374 Table 4: Ethno-religious distribution of Parliamentary seats . ......... Fel! Bokmärket är inte definierat. Table 4: Multiple Regression Models on Secular Voting in Iraq (OLS with fixed effects) ................ 411 5 1. INTRODUCTION In the period between 2005 and 2014, Iraq had four general elections. The results of those elections show
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