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.

Focus area

Despite the frequency of election boycotts, there is a lack of research that examines why some election boycotts are more successful than others. Increased knowledge on common opposition strategies to challenge authoritarian regimes is thus of great consequence to policy-makers and democracy advocates. This project will advance knowledge on the characteristics and effectiveness of election boycotts by providing evidence on election boycott effectiveness and the conditions under which boycotts contribute to political change.

Key objectives

This project will advance knowledge on the characteristics and effectiveness of election boycotts. Conceptually, the project evaluates boycott effectiveness against the opposition’s stated and underlying objectives rather than against aggregate democracy scores. Theoretically, the project breaks new ground by developing a theoretical framework that views boycott success as shaped by the degree to which the opposition can mobilize followers, has the resilience to sustain momentum, and generate leverage during the boycott. Empirically, the project will compile original and publicly available data on election boycotts between 1945 and 2022. In addition, the project will feed insights from the quantitative analysis into the analysis of original qualitative data from field research on two strategically selected boycotts.

External funding

Swedish Research Council, grant VR2024-00989

Researchers in the project:

Principal Investigator:

Sebastian van Baalen, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, Uppsala University

Participating researchers:

Gudlaug Olafsdottir, Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, Uppsala University

Jesper Bjarnesen, The Nordic Africa Institute

Project page on Uppsala Universitys webpage External link, opens in new window.

Recordings/interviews in the project: