Replication Data for: Weaponizing Post-Election Court Challenges: Assessing Losers’ Motivations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.059 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".