Opting Out? Explaining the Effectiveness of Election Boycotts

Democracy is on retreat around the world, and more than two-thirds of the world’s population today lives in autocracies. Opposition leaders do not sit idly by this alarming trend of democratic backsliding. A common tactic is to boycott sham elections and mobilize protest movements to force the incumbent to make concessions.

Despite the frequency of election boycotts, there is a lack of research that examines why some election boycotts are more successful than others.

This project will advance knowledge on the characteristics and effectiveness of election boycotts by evaluating success in relation to the opposition’s stated objectives.

First, the project develops a new theoretical framework that focuses on how the opposition’s mobilization, resilience, and leverage affect boycott effectiveness. Second, the project will compile new data on all election boycotts worldwide between 1945 and 2022.

Second, the project will use these data and insights from field research to examine under what conditions and through what mechanisms election boycotts force authoritarian regimes to make concessions on opposition demands.

Advancing knowledge on election boycotts is of great consequence to policy-makers and democracy advocates that have to determine what measures best preserve and consolidate democracy.

Our project contributes to this question by providing evidence on election boycott effectiveness and the conditions under which boycotts contribute to political change.