Armed Political Parties and Their Violence: Evidence from West Bengal, India

• In Event: Violent Actors and Threats to Local Democracy

Abstract

Political parties often contest elections while directly determining the timing and targets of physical coercion. Despite these armed political parties (APPs) competing in myriad democracies, their violence against political opponents remains insufficiently understood. After conceptually distinguishing APPs and their coercion from other categories of electoral and political violence, I theorize how incumbent electoral performance affects APP violence at the micro-level against opposition party supporters, workers, and leaders. Empirically, I leverage a regression discontinuity design and a novel dataset of armed party violence in the Indian state of West Bengal, and find that an incumbent APP's defeat in a constituency increases the top challenger's violence against opposition workers (but not opposition leaders) during the post-election period. An incumbent candidate's defeat generates a significant escalation of the erstwhile incumbent's violence, but only during the weeks prior to the next election cycle. I conduct in-depth process tracing of several electoral constituencies in West Bengal to shed light on the mechanisms which best explain these results. This study holds important implications for our understanding of political parties, democratic consolidation, and political violence.

Author

• Drew Stommes, Yale University