Seeing what Citizens Miss: How Monitors Improve Election Violence Reporting

Abstract

Documenting election violence is central to safeguarding electoral integrity, but collecting such data is difficult. While citizen crowdsourcing is often seen as a cost-effective alternative to traditional monitoring, we argue that monitors offer unique advantages through their training and insulation from local pressures. Our field experiment during Côte d’Ivoire’s 2020 presidential election assessed whether monitors enhance election violence documentation when used alongside citizen reporting. We found that the presence of a monitor increased the likelihood of violence being reported by 10.7 percentage points without affecting citizen behavior. Monitors with more geographic experience were more likely to report incidents, regardless of their proximity to their home communities. These findings highlight the importance of monitors in revealing latent violence and in enhancing the scope and depth of reports. This demonstrates the critical value of monitors, even as crowdsourced data become more prevalent.