Secular Party Rule and Religious Violence in Pakistan

Abstract

Does secular party incumbency affect religious violence? Existing theory is ambiguous. On the one hand, religiously motivated militants might target areas that vote secularists into office. On the other hand, secular party politicians, reliant on the support of violence-hit communities, may face powerful electoral incentives to quell attacks. Candidates bent on preventing bloodshed might also sort into such parties. To adjudicate these claims, we combine constituency-level election returns with event data on Islamist and sectarian violence in Pakistan (1988–2011). For identification, we compare districts where secular parties narrowly won or lost elections. We find that secularist rule causes a sizable reduction in local religious conflict. Additional analyses suggest that the result stems from electoral pressures to cater to core party supporters and not from politician selection. The effect is concentrated in regions with denser police presence, highlighting the importance of state capacity for suppressing religious disorder.

Electoral violence: An introduction

“…Regarding societal factors, scholars have linked ethnic polarization, the exclusion of ethnic groups from power, and parties representing particular ethnic or religious identities to greater incentives for electoral violence (Fjelde & Höglund, 2016a; Kuhn, 2015; Nellis, Weaver & Rosenzweig, 2016; Nellis & Siddiqui, 2018; Wilkinson, 2004). Furthermore, land patronage can provide elites with powerful tools for violent electoral mobilization (Boone, 2011; Boone & Kriger, 2012; Klaus & Mitchell, 2015).…”

On the reliability of published findings using the regression discontinuity design in political science

“…Mummolo (2018): Study uses time as a running variable, and so it's not consistent with our focus on running variables along which units receive a single score to the left or right of a discrete cut point. Nellis and Siddiqui (2018) This is an RD design combined with an instrumental variables designed in a way that adds several estimation and identification quirks. As such it doesn't neatly fit the definition of an RD study.…”

Civil Wartime Political Parties: Evidence from Four Rebellions in India

“…Recent studies on elections and violence primarily emphasize whether armed groups and political parties share similarly conservative religious, leftist, or right-wing ideologies. For instance, work on Pakistan examines whether secular party victories affect Islamist and sectarian violence (Nellis and Siddiqui, 2018), and whether electing Islamist parties in Indonesia affects right wing religious violence (Kuipers, Nellis and Weaver, 2019) . Querubin et al (2020) focus on the left-right cleavage in the Colombian civil war and find that electing previously-excluded left wing political parties in mayoral races increases subsequent right-wing paramilitary violence.…”