Pub Date : 2025-10-14DOI: 10.1177/00223433251360205
Jie Lian
Existing scholarship shows that transnational human rights advocacy depends on successful framing and audience mobilization. While most of this literature has focused on human rights framing by NGOs and advocates, governments can also frame human rights interests to their advantage. Focusing on the topic of police violence in the United States government’s transnational human rights advocacy practices, this article argues that a government may frame advocacy narratives for its benefit. For the government, strategic framing could be used to mobilize pressure against its geopolitical rivals, ease condemnation against its friends, and actively define advocated issues in a way favorable to its regime. With a novel network approach for text representation based on pre-trained large language models (LLMs), this article proposes an effective method to measure strategic framing from text data. Using the US State Department’s human rights reports, the results show that police violence accusations in the US government’s human rights advocacy narratives are strategically framed with reporting in favor of countries closer to the US. This research contributes to human rights scholarship by highlighting how governments’ national interests considerations could be incorporated into transnational human rights advocacy activities through strategic framing. The proposed LLM-based text data representation method also shows promising potential for broader text analysis tasks like topic modeling.
{"title":"Bad apples just for friends: A large language model approach to research on the strategic framing in government’s human rights advocacy narratives","authors":"Jie Lian","doi":"10.1177/00223433251360205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251360205","url":null,"abstract":"Existing scholarship shows that transnational human rights advocacy depends on successful framing and audience mobilization. While most of this literature has focused on human rights framing by NGOs and advocates, governments can also frame human rights interests to their advantage. Focusing on the topic of police violence in the United States government’s transnational human rights advocacy practices, this article argues that a government may frame advocacy narratives for its benefit. For the government, strategic framing could be used to mobilize pressure against its geopolitical rivals, ease condemnation against its friends, and actively define advocated issues in a way favorable to its regime. With a novel network approach for text representation based on pre-trained large language models (LLMs), this article proposes an effective method to measure strategic framing from text data. Using the US State Department’s human rights reports, the results show that police violence accusations in the US government’s human rights advocacy narratives are strategically framed with reporting in favor of countries closer to the US. This research contributes to human rights scholarship by highlighting how governments’ national interests considerations could be incorporated into transnational human rights advocacy activities through strategic framing. The proposed LLM-based text data representation method also shows promising potential for broader text analysis tasks like topic modeling.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145289511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-04DOI: 10.1177/00223433251360902
Victoria Gurevich, Christopher Gelpi
How does attachment to the nation influence one’s perception of white nationalist terrorism in the United States? Whereas terrorism has traditionally been understood as attacking the interests of the State, the recent increase in white supremacist violence in the United States is also deeply connected to the country’s history. An emerging body of literature has begun to examine the subjectivity of what is considered terrorism, often finding that respondents are less likely to identify white perpetrators as terrorists compared to non-white perpetrators for similar crimes. We engage a survey experiment to extend the ‘relational theory of terror perception’ to one’s attachment to the nation. We test how national attachment, an ostensibly positive disposition and distinct from patriotism and nationalism, shapes how racially motivated violence is perceived. We find that those with a stronger attachment to the nation are less concerned by hypothetical incidents of white supremacist violence than those with a weaker attachment to the nation. These biases that minimize concern for white supremacist violence are held across the political spectrum and are not simply a function of race, party affiliation, or political ideology. In fact, national attachment is a stronger predictor of attitudes toward white supremacy than respondent race; we find no support for our hypothesis that white respondents would be less concerned by violence committed by white perpetrators. Recognizing the link between positive attachment to the nation and tolerance for white nationalist violence is crucial for shaping America’s response to this threat to national security and civil peace.
{"title":"Hand in fist: Attachment to the nation and tolerance for white supremacist violence","authors":"Victoria Gurevich, Christopher Gelpi","doi":"10.1177/00223433251360902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251360902","url":null,"abstract":"How does attachment to the nation influence one’s perception of white nationalist terrorism in the United States? Whereas terrorism has traditionally been understood as attacking the interests of the State, the recent increase in white supremacist violence in the United States is also deeply connected to the country’s history. An emerging body of literature has begun to examine the subjectivity of what is considered terrorism, often finding that respondents are less likely to identify white perpetrators as terrorists compared to non-white perpetrators for similar crimes. We engage a survey experiment to extend the ‘relational theory of terror perception’ to one’s attachment to the nation. We test how national attachment, an ostensibly positive disposition and distinct from patriotism and nationalism, shapes how racially motivated violence is perceived. We find that those with a stronger attachment to the nation are less concerned by hypothetical incidents of white supremacist violence than those with a weaker attachment to the nation. These biases that minimize concern for white supremacist violence are held across the political spectrum and are not simply a function of race, party affiliation, or political ideology. In fact, national attachment is a stronger predictor of attitudes toward white supremacy than respondent race; we find no support for our hypothesis that white respondents would be less concerned by violence committed by white perpetrators. Recognizing the link between positive attachment to the nation and tolerance for white nationalist violence is crucial for shaping America’s response to this threat to national security and civil peace.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-03DOI: 10.1177/00223433251360202
Tobias Böhmelt
Countries can deliberately create, manipulate and exploit cross-border population movements to induce concessions from a target. Such ‘coercive engineered migrations’ are more likely to be successful when targeting domestically unstable states. I argue that environmental stress can add to this instability and ‘swamp’ a target’s ability to cope with cross-border population movements. Ultimately, the chances of migration-driven coercion to be successful should increase when target countries are both domestically unstable and suffer from environmental shocks. This claim is tested using quantitative data on the outcomes of coercive engineered migrations since the 1950s, which I combine with information on environmental extremes, as measured by the number of environmental disasters. Controlling for several other influences that may affect the outcome and employing sample-selection estimators that account for the non-random assignment of coercive engineered migration, the results support the argument as I show that the likelihood of successful migration-related coercion increases when domestically unstable target countries also face environmental disasters. This finding contributes to our understanding of migration as a foreign-policy instrument, it sheds new light on the role of environmental stress in international bargaining, and there are direct implications for conflict as a driver of cross-border population movements.
{"title":"Coercive engineered migrations and environmental stress","authors":"Tobias Böhmelt","doi":"10.1177/00223433251360202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251360202","url":null,"abstract":"Countries can deliberately create, manipulate and exploit cross-border population movements to induce concessions from a target. Such ‘coercive engineered migrations’ are more likely to be successful when targeting domestically unstable states. I argue that environmental stress can add to this instability and ‘swamp’ a target’s ability to cope with cross-border population movements. Ultimately, the chances of migration-driven coercion to be successful should increase when target countries are both domestically unstable and suffer from environmental shocks. This claim is tested using quantitative data on the outcomes of coercive engineered migrations since the 1950s, which I combine with information on environmental extremes, as measured by the number of environmental disasters. Controlling for several other influences that may affect the outcome and employing sample-selection estimators that account for the non-random assignment of coercive engineered migration, the results support the argument as I show that the likelihood of successful migration-related coercion increases when domestically unstable target countries also face environmental disasters. This finding contributes to our understanding of migration as a foreign-policy instrument, it sheds new light on the role of environmental stress in international bargaining, and there are direct implications for conflict as a driver of cross-border population movements.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145246413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-22DOI: 10.1177/00223433251345382
Elisa D’Amico, Santiago Sosa, Molly M Melinau
We consider how agreement terms create a national framework for development to address the root causes of conflict (public goods) and prevent recidivism through the economic reintegration of ex-combatants (private goods), thus offering agreement terms that are acceptable to both parties and enabling long-term peace. We argue that peace agreements that include promises of public goods, such as national development, and private goods, such as training opportunities and direct fund transfers to ex-combatants, are more capable of preventing violence resurgence. We examine variation in peace agreements contents and how these relate to the durability of peace using newly coded data on private goods. Using a series of Cox proportional hazard models, along with a variety of robustness checks to account for matching, placebo effects, selection bias and implementation factors, we offer evidence that peace agreement content has important implications for post-civil war outcomes. Our results suggest that agreements with provisions for fiscal federalism and for the economic reintegration of ex-combatants are more durable than those that do not. Moreover, contrary to expectations, most economic development promises do not affect the durability of peace.
{"title":"Private goods for peace: Economic provisions of peace agreements and the durability of peace","authors":"Elisa D’Amico, Santiago Sosa, Molly M Melinau","doi":"10.1177/00223433251345382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251345382","url":null,"abstract":"We consider how agreement terms create a national framework for development to address the root causes of conflict (public goods) and prevent recidivism through the economic reintegration of ex-combatants (private goods), thus offering agreement terms that are acceptable to both parties and enabling long-term peace. We argue that peace agreements that include promises of public goods, such as national development, and private goods, such as training opportunities and direct fund transfers to ex-combatants, are more capable of preventing violence resurgence. We examine variation in peace agreements contents and how these relate to the durability of peace using newly coded data on private goods. Using a series of Cox proportional hazard models, along with a variety of robustness checks to account for matching, placebo effects, selection bias and implementation factors, we offer evidence that peace agreement content has important implications for post-civil war outcomes. Our results suggest that agreements with provisions for fiscal federalism and for the economic reintegration of ex-combatants are more durable than those that do not. Moreover, contrary to expectations, most economic development promises do not affect the durability of peace.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"79 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145116523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-06DOI: 10.1177/00223433251352660
Miguel Carreras, Sofia Vera, Giancarlo Visconti
Democratic elections are ritualized and institutionalized processes that allow for the peaceful resolution of political disagreements and conflicts. However, electoral processes also serve as focal points in which right-wing political parties can adopt a negative (or xenophobic) discourse against immigrants and other minority groups in order to obtain political benefits (i.e. more electoral support). Left-wing parties are often better off abandoning the immigration issue and focusing on other policy areas during the campaign. As a result, anti-immigration narratives become more prominent during periods of election salience. In this article, we take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to explore the effects of election salience on individuals’ anti-immigration attitudes. We find that immigration attitudes become more polarized just after an election has taken place. On the one hand, right-wing respondents exhibit more negative attitudes toward immigrants when the election is salient, but those negative views decrease as we move away from the election. On the other hand, left-wing respondents express lower levels of xenophobia immediately after the election, but their immigration views become more negative as time since the election increases. Surprisingly, these effects are only detectable in contexts where the immigration issue is less salient.
{"title":"Democratic elections and anti-immigration attitudes","authors":"Miguel Carreras, Sofia Vera, Giancarlo Visconti","doi":"10.1177/00223433251352660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251352660","url":null,"abstract":"Democratic elections are ritualized and institutionalized processes that allow for the peaceful resolution of political disagreements and conflicts. However, electoral processes also serve as focal points in which right-wing political parties can adopt a negative (or xenophobic) discourse against immigrants and other minority groups in order to obtain political benefits (i.e. more electoral support). Left-wing parties are often better off abandoning the immigration issue and focusing on other policy areas during the campaign. As a result, anti-immigration narratives become more prominent during periods of election salience. In this article, we take advantage of the timing of the cross-national post-election surveys included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to explore the effects of election salience on individuals’ anti-immigration attitudes. We find that immigration attitudes become more polarized just after an election has taken place. On the one hand, right-wing respondents exhibit more negative attitudes toward immigrants when the election is salient, but those negative views decrease as we move away from the election. On the other hand, left-wing respondents express lower levels of xenophobia immediately after the election, but their immigration views become more negative as time since the election increases. Surprisingly, these effects are only detectable in contexts where the immigration issue is less salient.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145002862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-02DOI: 10.1177/00223433251347792
Juan Masullo, Krzysztof Krakowski, Davide Morisi
How does crime influence democratic attitudes and behaviors? Existing research offers conflicting answers: some argue that crime fosters antidemocratic preferences, while others suggest it increases democratic engagement. To reconcile this paradox, we conceptualize democracy as a multidimensional system with distinct components that can be decoupled. We distinguish between different (anti)democratic preferences tied to core democratic principles and argue that contextual exposure to crime may heighten support for undemocratic enforcement measures without eroding commitment to procedural democracy. To test this, we conducted a large online survey ( N = 3108) in Brazil – a country profoundly affected by various forms of crime – using two embedded experimental protocols. Our findings show that crime exposure increases support for unlawful enforcement practices, such as police overreach and vigilante justice, while leaving attitudes toward military coups, executive aggrandizement and support for democracy as the best form of government largely unaffected. Understanding this nuanced relationship is especially important in contexts where crime is pervasive and politically instrumentalized. That exposure to crime leads citizens to tolerate breaches of the rule of law in the name of public safety is deeply concerning. Yet, our results offer cautious optimism: support for undemocratic enforcement does not necessarily undermine broader democratic commitments.
{"title":"Does crime breed authoritarianism? Crime exposure, democratic decoupling and political attitudes in Brazil","authors":"Juan Masullo, Krzysztof Krakowski, Davide Morisi","doi":"10.1177/00223433251347792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251347792","url":null,"abstract":"How does crime influence democratic attitudes and behaviors? Existing research offers conflicting answers: some argue that crime fosters antidemocratic preferences, while others suggest it increases democratic engagement. To reconcile this paradox, we conceptualize democracy as a multidimensional system with distinct components that can be decoupled. We distinguish between different (anti)democratic preferences tied to core democratic principles and argue that contextual exposure to crime may heighten support for undemocratic enforcement measures without eroding commitment to procedural democracy. To test this, we conducted a large online survey ( <jats:italic>N</jats:italic> = 3108) in Brazil – a country profoundly affected by various forms of crime – using two embedded experimental protocols. Our findings show that crime exposure increases support for unlawful enforcement practices, such as police overreach and vigilante justice, while leaving attitudes toward military coups, executive aggrandizement and support for democracy as the best form of government largely unaffected. Understanding this nuanced relationship is especially important in contexts where crime is pervasive and politically instrumentalized. That exposure to crime leads citizens to tolerate breaches of the rule of law in the name of public safety is deeply concerning. Yet, our results offer cautious optimism: support for undemocratic enforcement does not necessarily undermine broader democratic commitments.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144928555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-09-02DOI: 10.1177/00223433251347772
Andrés F Rivera, Juliana Tappe Ortiz, Carlo Koos
Violence against social activists is a global phenomenon, increasingly prevalent in democratic and conflict-affected states. Violence targeting women activists, in particular, highlights the intersection of gender-based discrimination and the risks associated with activism. We theorize that the killings of women activists reduce both women’s motivation to run for office and voters’ willingness to elect women candidates, driven by fears of further retaliation from armed groups and a demand for protective masculine norms in politics. Using novel fine-grained data on violence against activists, we demonstrate that the killings of women activists in Colombia decrease women’s candidacies and lower voter support for women in mayoral elections. Additional analyses suggest that women’s visibility during peace negotiations and prior territorial control by left-wing FARC rebels mitigated this effect, emphasizing how variation in gender norms can alter the political consequences of violence. Our findings reveal that considering the gender of victims offers important insights into how exposure to political violence influences democratic elections.
{"title":"Gender in elections: The consequences of killing women activists","authors":"Andrés F Rivera, Juliana Tappe Ortiz, Carlo Koos","doi":"10.1177/00223433251347772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251347772","url":null,"abstract":"Violence against social activists is a global phenomenon, increasingly prevalent in democratic and conflict-affected states. Violence targeting women activists, in particular, highlights the intersection of gender-based discrimination and the risks associated with activism. We theorize that the killings of women activists reduce both women’s motivation to run for office and voters’ willingness to elect women candidates, driven by fears of further retaliation from armed groups and a demand for protective masculine norms in politics. Using novel fine-grained data on violence against activists, we demonstrate that the killings of women activists in Colombia decrease women’s candidacies and lower voter support for women in mayoral elections. Additional analyses suggest that women’s visibility during peace negotiations and prior territorial control by left-wing FARC rebels mitigated this effect, emphasizing how variation in gender norms can alter the political consequences of violence. Our findings reveal that considering the gender of victims offers important insights into how exposure to political violence influences democratic elections.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144927838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-30DOI: 10.1177/00223433251353650
Marie-Therese Meye
Election denial is a popular tool used by election losers to challenge democratic processes, often with harmful consequences for political stability. While some research suggests that actual fraud serves as a focal point for protest, other work emphasizes citizens’ perceptions of fraud and partisanship. This study contributes to the debate by pointing to a possible mechanism for why fraud perceptions and partisanship might matter more for protest mobilization. I argue that local elite endorsement of election denial plays a crucial role in amplifying and localizing national narratives of stolen elections, making them more resonant within specific communities. I test this argument using the case of the 2020 US presidential election, where the widespread election denial narrative by President Trump led to highly uneven patterns of pro-Trump protests across the country. Using novel data on protest activity based on anonymized cellphone records and the timing of public endorsements of fraud claims by members of Congress, I demonstrate that local elite support for election denial significantly increased protest mobilization within their districts, particularly in districts already primed for dissent. This study sheds light on the democratic risks posed by election denial, showing how elite-driven disinformation can intensify and localize mobilization, even in the absence of credible claims of electoral fraud.
{"title":"Why some districts march more: Protest mobilization in the wake of US representatives’ election denial","authors":"Marie-Therese Meye","doi":"10.1177/00223433251353650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251353650","url":null,"abstract":"Election denial is a popular tool used by election losers to challenge democratic processes, often with harmful consequences for political stability. While some research suggests that actual fraud serves as a focal point for protest, other work emphasizes citizens’ perceptions of fraud and partisanship. This study contributes to the debate by pointing to a possible mechanism for why fraud perceptions and partisanship might matter more for protest mobilization. I argue that local elite endorsement of election denial plays a crucial role in amplifying and localizing national narratives of stolen elections, making them more resonant within specific communities. I test this argument using the case of the 2020 US presidential election, where the widespread election denial narrative by President Trump led to highly uneven patterns of pro-Trump protests across the country. Using novel data on protest activity based on anonymized cellphone records and the timing of public endorsements of fraud claims by members of Congress, I demonstrate that local elite support for election denial significantly increased protest mobilization within their districts, particularly in districts already primed for dissent. This study sheds light on the democratic risks posed by election denial, showing how elite-driven disinformation can intensify and localize mobilization, even in the absence of credible claims of electoral fraud.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144919322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-29DOI: 10.1177/00223433251353645
Noyonika Das
How and why do incumbents use local elections as tools for subverting democracy and establishing party dominance? Integrating literatures on political violence and decentralization, this article argues that incumbents use violence to engineer non-contestation among opposition actors in local elections. Drawing on the strength of local networks, incumbents prioritize their own strongholds for such violence, leading candidates to withdraw and resulting in uncontested seats. I explore this argument with data on local elections from West Bengal, a state in India that has held local elections since the 1970s but where competition is spatially uneven, resulting in a significant number of uncontested seats. The theoretical expectations are tested with disaggregated data on competitiveness and uncontested seats for 3,000 local electoral units. The article finds that increased violence against the opposition in an electoral unit leads to seats going uncontested in that unit. I complement these findings with 60 qualitative interviews from political elites and non-elites, which indicate that violence is an important means through which incumbents engineer non-contestation. These findings have important implications for research on political violence and subnational authoritarianism, particularly in understanding the emergence and persistence of subnational authoritarianism in decentralized countries.
{"title":"Engineered non-contestation: Deterring electoral contestation using violence in local elections","authors":"Noyonika Das","doi":"10.1177/00223433251353645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251353645","url":null,"abstract":"How and why do incumbents use local elections as tools for subverting democracy and establishing party dominance? Integrating literatures on political violence and decentralization, this article argues that incumbents use violence to engineer non-contestation among opposition actors in local elections. Drawing on the strength of local networks, incumbents prioritize their own strongholds for such violence, leading candidates to withdraw and resulting in uncontested seats. I explore this argument with data on local elections from West Bengal, a state in India that has held local elections since the 1970s but where competition is spatially uneven, resulting in a significant number of uncontested seats. The theoretical expectations are tested with disaggregated data on competitiveness and uncontested seats for 3,000 local electoral units. The article finds that increased violence against the opposition in an electoral unit leads to seats going uncontested in that unit. I complement these findings with 60 qualitative interviews from political elites and non-elites, which indicate that violence is an important means through which incumbents engineer non-contestation. These findings have important implications for research on political violence and subnational authoritarianism, particularly in understanding the emergence and persistence of subnational authoritarianism in decentralized countries.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144919320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-25DOI: 10.1177/00223433251352676
Maureen Fubara
What explains variation in incumbents’ choice of political violence perpetrators? Incumbents often sponsor violence in elections but do not typically engage in it themselves, instead delegating violence to security forces, armed groups, party wings, or regular citizens. Existing theory poorly explains such variation, which has privileged incumbents’ incentives to plausibly deny their involvement. This article develops a theory centred around variation in electoral violence perpetrators. Focusing on the subnational level, I argue that variation in rents helps explain why some incumbents recruit armed groups while others rely on ordinary citizens. Incumbents with access to large rents can afford to hire costly yet effective armed groups. In contrast, those with limited rents recruit cheaper but less capable alternatives such as ordinary citizens. I use over one hundred interviews conducted with politicians, journalists, voters, civil society members and citizens in four Nigerian states, Lagos, Rivers, Plateau and Nasarawa, to probe the plausibility of the argument. I triangulate interview findings with newspapers and observer reports. Findings show that in Lagos and Rivers, incumbents hire and maintain armed groups such as transport workers and cult groups due to high rents, while those in the low-rents state of Nasarawa hire citizens to perpetrate violence. The study contributes to the literature on decentralization, joint production of political violence, and the resource curse.
{"title":"Renting political violence: A political economy of rents, access and violence delegation","authors":"Maureen Fubara","doi":"10.1177/00223433251352676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251352676","url":null,"abstract":"What explains variation in incumbents’ choice of political violence perpetrators? Incumbents often sponsor violence in elections but do not typically engage in it themselves, instead delegating violence to security forces, armed groups, party wings, or regular citizens. Existing theory poorly explains such variation, which has privileged incumbents’ incentives to plausibly deny their involvement. This article develops a theory centred around variation in electoral violence perpetrators. Focusing on the subnational level, I argue that variation in rents helps explain why some incumbents recruit armed groups while others rely on ordinary citizens. Incumbents with access to large rents can afford to hire costly yet effective armed groups. In contrast, those with limited rents recruit cheaper but less capable alternatives such as ordinary citizens. I use over one hundred interviews conducted with politicians, journalists, voters, civil society members and citizens in four Nigerian states, Lagos, Rivers, Plateau and Nasarawa, to probe the plausibility of the argument. I triangulate interview findings with newspapers and observer reports. Findings show that in Lagos and Rivers, incumbents hire and maintain armed groups such as transport workers and cult groups due to high rents, while those in the low-rents state of Nasarawa hire citizens to perpetrate violence. The study contributes to the literature on decentralization, joint production of political violence, and the resource curse.","PeriodicalId":48324,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Peace Research","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.6,"publicationDate":"2025-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144898802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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