Why does data on election violence only include fatal incidents?

Researcher:  Stuart Morrison, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Supervisor: Prof, Rod Alence, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

In this work I seek to understand the effect that fatalities have on the accuracy of election violence datasets, by asking “what happens to the quality of the dataset if we create a dataset that includes non-fatal incidents?” The results from the study show that including non-fatal events can decrease the accuracy and overall quality of the dataset by including too much noise and that the fatalities themselves help in describing how the actors interact with each other.