Lauren Young — Let Them Be Warned Not To Play With Fire: Understanding Electoral Repression in Zimbabwe
Lauren Young — Let Them Be Warned Not To Play With Fire: Understanding Electoral Repression in Zimbabwe
Thursday, October 16, 202512:00 PM - 1:15 PM (Pacific)
Virtual to Public. If prompted for a password, use: 123456
Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E-008 Conference Room in Encina Hall may attend in person.
When and how do autocrats use violence to win elections? Why don't they always use violence? This talk uses the past 25 years of elections in Zimbabwe to argue that autocrats try to avoid election violence and often use it as a last resort because it carries the risk of both backfire from citizens and holdup by organized agents of violence. Citizens’ reactions to repression are high variance and difficult for autocrats to predict because they depend in part on internal psychological characteristics that shape emotional reactions to violence. When electoral repression is used as a last resort, it has implications for how and where it can be organized. However, autocrats cannot always scale back election violence, particularly when it is perpetrated by state security forces.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Lauren Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. She is a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and a Steering Committee member of the Future of Democracy Initiative at the UC IGCC. She co-runs the UC Davis Contentious Politics Lab with Juan Tellez.
She studies political violence and collective action. Her main research agenda is on election violence, including how it affects voter behavior and how elites strategize and organize violent elections. She began this research in Zimbabwe. She is currently researching how contextual factors like party strength shape the causes and effects of election violence, and doing research with policy partners on how to prevent and mitigate its effects. Her second research agenda is on collective action after violent crime. This work, based primarily in Mexico, tries to explain when citizens demand punitive responses to crimes and when they mobilize around vigilante action.
Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to Room E-008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.