Political Violence Cycles

Abstract

How do electoral incentives affect the counterterrorism policies chosen by reelection-seeking incumbents? This article tests the argument that governments alter their choice of security strategies as elections approach to signal competence to potential voters. Which policy they select should depend on the intended audience of the signal. Governments seeking support from their partisan base should select different policies than those courting the support of moderates. Using data on Israel-West Bank checkpoint closures and casualties in the Palestinian territories between 2000 and 2013, I find evidence that Israeli governments manipulate security strategies in the run-up to elections in a manner consistent with an attempt to attract support from core voters. As elections approach, left governments become more dovish on security, while right governments become more hawkish. The relationship between partisanship and policy choice raises concerns that electoral incentives may induce democratic governments to select inefficient or suboptimal security strategies around election time.

Encouraged to Cheat? Federal Incentives and Career Concerns at the Sub-national Level as Determinants of Under-Reporting of COVID-19 Mortality in Russia

“…Its argument is straightforward: incumbents introduce policies attractive to voters, such as increasing public spending, prior to elections at the expense of policies implemented in the immediate aftermath of the elections. While the original political business-cycle literature was developed for fiscal policies, similar arguments were later used to explain the temporal dynamics of a wide variety of other policies in democracies (Ahuja 1994;Berdejó and Yuchtman 2013;Bracco 2018;Canes-Wrone and Shotts 2004;Marinov, Nomikos and Robbins 2015;Nanes 2017;Potrafke 2019;Shmuel 2021;Vadlamannati 2015).…”

Mowing the grass

“…Second, previous work highlights that electoral competition warps the government’s incentives to fight terrorists, resulting in suboptimal counterterrorism provisions (Dragu and Polborn, 2014; Di Lonardo, 2019; Bueno de Mesquita, 2007; Dragu, 2017). Majoritarian electoral institutions encourage the formation of terrorist groups (Aksoy and Carter, 2014), and elections can create political violence cycles (Crisman-Cox, 2018; Berrebi and Klor, 2006; Nanes, 2017; Aksoy, 2018). In contrast, mowing the grass reveals a more benign avenue through which electoral competition influences conflict.…”

“…Third, although there is a rich history of connecting models of terrorism to data, the connection is generally limited to using reduced-form regressions to test theoretical implications (e.g., Aksoy, 2018; Nanes, 2017) or using case studies to trace theoretical mechanisms (e.g., Schram, 2022; Spaniel, 2019; Berrebi and Klor, 2006). In contrast, this article illustrates the benefits of model calibration.…”