The first essay “Protest: Onset and (De)Escalation” argues that the literature on Civil Conflict has reached a point of maturity in identifying the correlates of conflict; however, the risk factors for conflict are far more common than conflict itself. Even when underlying conditions appear similar, as for the countries impacted by the Arab Spring, diverse outcomes can arise. By modeling the escalation process and incorporating protest as a signal to the government and potential dissidents in society, this paper shows how similar starting conditions can lead to protest, government concessions, or even civil war. This paper also contributes to understanding the relationship between repression and dissent. We argue that repression may reduce overall dissent, but cause dissent that occurs to become more violent. Finally, we examine some predictions of the model; this is done by complementing traditional conflict data from Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) with data on protest from the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD). The analysis finds support for two key predictions in the model: the likelihood of a concession increases with protest size, and a non-monotonic relationship between protest size and the probability of escalation to conflict.The second essay “Electoral Violence: An Empirical Examination of Existing Theories” argues that recent studies of election violence have found that violence mars as many as 80 percent of African elections. However, the ways in which violence is used to influence elections are still unclear. Two theoretical frameworks have been suggested. The first argues that violence is targeted directly at core opposition supporters in an attempt to prevent them from voting. The second is more nuanced and argues that it is more feasible to deter unaligned voters with untargeted violence because they are less committed to vote for any particular party. A party could increase their vote share by excluding unaligned voters if they have a stronger advantage in core supporters than unaligned voters, because excluding unaligned voters places more weight on each party's core supporters. By combining survey data from the Round 4 Afrobarometer survey with event data from the Social Conflict in Africa Database, we compare the validity of these theories. First, we confirm that violence is associated with a reduced likelihood of voting. More importantly, we find important heterogeneity in this association. Supporting the first framework, voters with a strong political affiliation do cease voting if they personally fear violence. In support of the second framework, we find that unaligned voters are the only group significantly less likely to vote in the presence of violence, even without reporting a greater fear of violence. We conclude that both targeted and untargeted violence are potentially effective strategies, but untargeted violence appears to be more common. Finally, the third essay “Profiling in Violent Elections” argues that recent theoretical and empirical research on election violence has presented several potential ways in which violence may be used to influence the electoral process. A key differentiation between emerging theories, as highlighted in Wallsworth (2016), is whether violence is targeted directly at opposition supporters or indirectly at unaligned voters more likely to vote for the opposition. Wallsworth (2016) demonstrated that reactions to violence are consistent with both strategies. Targeted violence is associated with a lower likelihood of voting, and unaligned voters were the only group to react to indirectly targeted violence. One way to distinguish which theory is more viable in a given country is to unravel how successfully a potential perpetrator of violence could profile the opposition. This paper examines the viability of profiling, which characteristics may be used to profile, who appears to be targeted by violence, and how characteristics which correlate with an individual's political affiliation also correlate with their fear of violence.
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