Disputed Elections in Presidential Democracies: Challenging Electoral Outcomes as a Negotiation Strategy

Elections are defining moments in which the stability of democracies is tested. The behavior of losing parties is key in this stage of the democratic process. In authoritarian regimes, losing parties might reasonably challenge the outcome of elections as consequence of widespread and systematic fraud that reverts the outcome of the election. However, post-election disputes also happen in 21% of the democratic presidential elections since the beginning of the third wave of democracy. Why so? I argue that in presidential democracies, losing political parties are not rejecting the outcome of the election to publicize fraud but rather to induce the winning party to negotiate benefits for the losing party, and to win leverage during these negotiations. Using an original dataset that codes behaviors of runner-up candidates in 180 presidential elections (1974-2012) and that codes 763 years of electoral legislation, and after controlling for the quality of the election and the margin of victory, I find evidence that in democracies losing parties with an unfavorable negotiating position in Congress will be more prone to dispute presidential election outcomes. Elections are defining moments in which the stability of democracies is tested. The behavior of losing candidates is key in this stage of the democratic process. If a losing candidate challenges the outcome of an election, this action opens the door to political instability and chaos. Even in an established democracy like the United States, Al Gore’s contestation of the 2000 presidential election lead to an unprecedented constitutional crisis for which American institutions will be ill prepared (Posner 2004) and put in question the institutional legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court (Gibson et.al. 2003). In other democracies, contesting election results could result in electoral apathy and lower turnout (Simpser 2012, Birch 2010). It might also represent a motive for post-electoral violence; consider that ethnic civil wars are most likely to start as post-electoral conflicts (Cederman et.al. 2011). For example, in Nigeria there were around 1,000 deaths after the 2011 presidential election when the defeated candidate failed to contain his supporters. Given that challenging electoral results has the potential to break down constitutional order and democracy itself, understanding the conditions under which losing candidates contest elections becomes relevant. In theory, parties participating in democratic elections know the rules of the game in advance and agree to compete under those rules and accept the results. But, as Przeworski (1991) puts it, democracy is a system that produces winners and losers. The norm is that in democracies losing parties accept defeat and go home to wait for the next election. However, disputed election results are not an anomaly in presidential democracies. In 21% of the 180 democratic presidential elections in the world since 1974 the losing party challenged the outcome (See Figure 1 for a geographical description). Such initial challenges —which take the form of losing candidates or party leaders