Armed Groups and Elections

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As elections continue to be held in the midst of conflict or its immediate aftermath, non-state armed groups have come to play a central role in how elections are being contested. From covertly funding campaigns and candidates to forwarding their own political parties, armed groups have adopted a variety of electoral strategies for accomplishing their political goals. It is not, however, only politically-oriented armed groups which have demonstrated a capacity and willingness to influence elections. Criminal organizations the world over have been heavily involved in electoral politics for some time, engaging in a dizzying array of strategies for influencing elections: voter coercion, illicit campaign contributions, assassinating political candidates, and restricting campaign access to particular territories. This panel brings together scholars of both political and criminal armed groups to compare across these disparate cases and aggregate the findings of a fascinating new area of research in the study of armed groups.

Jung advances our understanding of the broader behavior of armed groups by asking whether elections incentivize rebels to increase the quantity and quality of service provision. Drawing on original data on rebel service provision, Jung finds that rebel-provided welfare follows a political business cycle, increasing prior to elections and dropping off in their aftermath. Ong takes us to a context where only local elections are held, examining “everyday repression” by street-level bureaucrats and “thugs-for-hire” as a governance strategy at the local level in China. In contrast to organized repression, such routine and low-level repression is more likely to result in a popular backlash as citizens perceive it to be both less legitimate and less costly to resist. Turnbull takes up the question of when armed groups refuse to carry out electoral violence for politicians. The paper uses comparative case studies and fine-grained evidence from Nigeria to demonstrate that armed groups divided by internal factions are more likely to accept politicians’ overtures to engage in electoral violence on their behalf. Finally, drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Albarracín and Barnes reveal how alliances between drug-trafficking organizations and politicians shape voting behavior. They examine how the state’s efforts to reclaim its monopoly on violence from 2008 to 2014 upended these relationships and re-shaped municipal-level elections.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Para-Police, Violence, and Routine Coercion in China - Lynette H. Ong, University of Toronto

• When Do Armed Groups Refuse to Carry Out Electoral Violence? - Megan Turnbull, University of Georgia

• Criminalized Democracy: The Electoral Impact of Rio de Janeiro’s Drug Gangs - Juan Albarracin Dierolf, Universidad Icesi

• Political Assassinations - Mariana Carvalho, University of California, San Diego

Chair

• Aila M. Matanock University of California-Berkeley

Discussant

• Paul Staniland University of Chicago