Fighting to Win! How Discrimination Technology Conditions Electoral Violence

• In Event: Parties, Divisive Issues, and New Technologies

Abstract

Why do political parties commit pre-election violence in some countries and districts but not in others? Conventional wisdom states that the closeness of elections is associated with a greater vulnerability to/ higher intensity of pre-election violence. Scholars have traditionally argued that this relationship holds at the subnational level, and showed that political parties choose to commit violence at competitive districts in countries such as India (Wilkinson, 2006), in Kenya (Kasara, 2014) and in Zimbabwe (Robinson & Torvik, 2009). However, recent scholars have challenged this notion by showing that violence takes place in strongholds in countries such as Zambia (Wahman & Goldring, 2020) and in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia among others (Rauschenbach & Paula, 2019). This research resolves these contradicting findings through a decision-theoretic model and examines both sub- and cross-national equilibrium conditions. Accordingly, if political parties have capability discriminate voters' party ideology (or high discrimination technology) commit violence in competitive districts. Parties which cannot discriminate voters (due to their low discrimination technology) choose to commit violence in strongholds.

Author

• Tolgahan Dilgin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign