Elections, Violence, and Parties

ongoing

Since 1990, deadly violence has occurred in more than 30% of elections held outside of advanced, industrialized democracies. In the 2007 Kenyan elections and the 2010 Côte D’Ivoire elections, violence killed thousands of people in just a few months, undoing years of institution-building and undermining democracy. Much of contemporary politics unfolds in countries holding competitive elections but lacking institutionalized democracy. In these countries, election violence still happens routinely because politicians use violence to influence election outcomes in their favor. A major political and scholarly problem is that we know a lot about the conditions that make elections more or less violent, but lack insight into the more fundamental issues of how violence plays out on the ground. Departing from the focus on intensity in existing work, I develop a novel party-centered theory to explain the nature, organization, and consequences of election violence. Political parties are crucial actors linking politicians and citizens, and I attribute a central role to parties’ organizational and social links. The diversity of parties’ social support influences whether violence provides electoral benefits, implying that parties supported by a single group benefit more from violence. Party organization at the local level in turn explains whether groups can engage in targeted violence or have to rely on poorly-controlled thugs-for-hire. This theory changes how we think about election violence, explaining (1) how and why election violence happens and (2) the consequences of election violence for citizens. EVaP breaks new empirical ground by testing these claims subnationally in India and Nigeria, two of the world’s largest emerging democracies. EVaP uses a multi-method approach to examine within-country variation in party institutions, social support, and election violence in India and Nigeria, combining fieldwork interviews, quantitative data, survey experiments, and surveys.