Replication Data for: Weaponizing Post-Election Court Challenges: Assessing Losers’ Motivations

Globally, losing candidates have increasingly relied on courts to settle post-electoral disputes. However, scholars have not systematically explored candidates’ motivations to mount legal challenges and their impact on democracy. We argue that while overturning electoral results motivates most candidates, many also use courts for other strategic reasons, such as to bolster future electoral prospects and negotiate government jobs. Post-electoral litigation that is not responsive to fraud and irregularities can threaten democracy by eroding judicial legitimacy and increasing courts’ vulnerability to political interference. We develop a classification scheme to highlight candidates’ multiple motivations for filing electoral petitions. Using an original database of sub-national court challenges after the 2013 Kenyan general elections, we code only ten of the seventy-one cases as `high probability’ attempts to overturn election outcomes. Meanwhile, the majority of Kenyan candidate petitioners seemingly ‘weaponized’ the courts by pursuing challenges that reflected multiple motivations other than overturning their election.

在全球范围内，选举失利的候选人愈发依赖法院解决选举后争端。然而，学界尚未系统探究候选人发起法律诉讼的动因及其对民主政治的影响。本文认为，尽管推翻选举结果是多数候选人提起诉讼的核心动因，但不少候选人还出于其他战略考量利用司法程序，例如为提升未来选举竞争力、谋求政府职位进行铺垫。未针对选举舞弊与违规行为的选举诉讼，会通过侵蚀司法合法性、加剧法院面临政治干预的风险，对民主政治构成威胁。我们构建了一套分类框架，用以厘清候选人提起选举诉讼的多重动因。依托2013年肯尼亚大选后地方层面法院诉讼的原创数据库，我们将71起案件中仅10起归类为"高概率"推翻选举结果的诉讼尝试。与此同时，绝大多数肯尼亚候选人提起的诉讼看似是在"司法武器化"——其所提出的诉求并非旨在推翻选举结果，而是承载了多重其他动因。