La séance du 27 avril 2010 à la Rada Suprême d'Ukraine : une scène de guérilla parlementaire

Explaining Physical Violence in Parliaments

“…Carole Spary, for instance, showed how disruptive actions are planned and carried out in order to draw attention to particular issues, constituting “a ritual for performing political contention” (Spary 2013; Spary, Armitage, and Johnson 2014, 204). Ioulia Shukan, who ethnographically studied episodes of violence in Ukraine’s legislature, argued that particularly when elections are approaching, physical violence signals to voters how committed MPs are to – quite literally – fighting for them (Shukan 2010, 2013). In a similar vein, Batto and Beaulieu write that “legislators who choose to participate in brawls are taking advantage of an opportunity to communicate with an audience they consider important for re-election” (Batto and Beaulieu 2020, 317).…”

“…But when parliament is polarized into two roughly equally-sized camps, the stakes and the uncertainty are high, increasing the incentives for tactical violence. The opposition, in a strong position in terms of its seat share but with ultimately often limited means of influencing the legislative outcome, could then be more amenable to employing violence (Shukan 2010(Shukan , 2013Wolfe 2004). In a similar fashion, government MPs may try to forcibly impose their will when their preferred outcome is within reach but still uncertain, facing opposition, obstruction, or delay.…”

“…We revisit the initial operationalization of Gandrud's theory of credible commitment problems developed by Gandrud to explain parliamentary violence, age of democracy, and the disproportionality between vote share and seat share (Gandrud 2016). Furthermore, Shukan's work suggested that performative violence could be particularly attractive in the run-up to general elections, so as to woo voters with their displays of political and ideological commitment (Shukan 2010(Shukan , 2013. Lastly, we also control for a range of other possible explanatory factors, such as levels of interpersonal trust in society, the percentage of women in parliament, and various other political and socioeconomic variables (Gandrud 2016;Shukan 2010Shukan , 2013.…”

“…2 The attack took place despite Westminster MPs being sat "two sword lengths apart", 3 an architectural feature symbolically intended to highlight the imperative to settle conflicts peacefully (Gandrud 2016). More recently, in Ukraine, brawls between parliamentarians became increasingly common in the run-up to the civil war that broke out in 2014 (Shukan 2010(Shukan , 2013. And in Turkey, fistfights occurred regularly throughout the 2010s as Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party remodeled the political system of the country and increasingly curbed political and civil liberties.…”

“…Existing scholarship tells us that legislative violence is most often employed to achieve important political objectives (Batto and Beaulieu 2020;Gandrud 2016). Violence has a performative component effectively serve as a way of communicating with voters, a public performance designed to draw attention or signal commitment to a cause (Batto and Beaulieu 2020;Shukan 2013Shukan , 2010. But it can also be used tactically in an attempt to forcibly block or push through laws, appointments, treaty ratifications, constitutional amendments, etc.…”