Unequal votes, unequal violence: Malapportionment and election violence in India

Abstract

Elections held outside of advanced, industrialized democracies can turn violent because elites use coercion to demobilize political opponents. The literature has established that closely contested elections are associated with more violence. I depart from this emphasis on competitiveness by highlighting how institutional biases in electoral systems, in particular uneven apportionment, affect incentives for violence. Malapportionment refers to a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population, violating the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. Drawing on recent work on malapportionment establishing that overrepresented districts are targeted with clientelist strategies, are more homogenous, and are biased in favor of district-level incumbent parties, I argue that overrepresented districts present fewer incentives for using violence. In contrast, elites in well-apportioned or underrepresented districts exert less control over electoral outcomes because such districts have more heterogenous voter preferences, raising incumbent and opposition demands to employ violence. I examine the effects of malapportionment on violence using constituency-level elections data and new, disaggregated, and geocoded event data on the incidence of election violence in India. Results from six parliamentary elections from 1991 to 2009 show that electoral violence is less prevalent in overrepresented constituencies, and that violence increases in equally apportioned and moderately underrepresented districts. The analysis establishes additional observable implications of the argument for district voter homogeneity and incumbent victory, accounts for confounders such as urbanization and state-level partisanship, and validates measures of election violence. The findings illustrate that institutional biases shape incentives for electoral violence.

Electoral violence: An introduction

“…Their analysis of Zambia finds that incumbent and opposition strongholds experience more violence, especially in constituencies with good connectivity. Finally, Daxecker (2020) shows that the greater electoral influence of overrepresented constituencies reduces the demand for electoral violence in these areas. These contributions highlight the importance of establishing the microfoundations of arguments on high-stakes elections and violence that we noted in the previous section.…”

“…High-stakes elections A third theme pertains to the stakes in elections and their effect on violence. Articles examine the underlying conditions contributing to high-stake elections (Klaus, 2020) and question the conventional wisdom linking competitiveness to greater risk of violence (Wahman & Goldring, 2020;Daxecker, 2020). Klaus (2020) examines how the distribution of land rights in Kenya shapes people's trust in state institutions and perceptions of the electoral process.…”

“…A second theme concerns the formal and informal institutional foundations of electoral violence. The contributions explore the effect of authoritarian legacies (Brosché, Fjelde & Höglund, 2020), alternations in power (Ruiz-Rufino & Birch, 2020), party institutionalization (Fjelde, 2020), institutional biases (Daxecker, 2020), and informal networks of patronage (Berenschot, 2020). The strength and political inclusiveness of institutions are important mediators of the relationship between the instrumental aims of actors and their choice of political weapon.…”

Political party strength and electoral violence

“…To explain variation in electoral violence, existing literature has pointed to variables that increase the incentives of political contenders to resort to violent electoral strategies. Factors that strengthen the competitiveness of the race and raise the potential payoffs from swinging the vote at the margin include the closeness of the vote (Hafner-Burton, Hyde & Jablonski, 2014; Salehyan & Linebarger, 2015; Wilkinson, 2004); whether the incumbent is standing for re-election (Taylor, Pevehouse & Straus, 2017); whether the country has seen a turnover in power (Ruiz-Rufino & Birch, 2020); whether electoral rules produce winner-takes-all outcomes (Fjelde & Höglund, 2016); and whether the electoral district in question is underrepresented in the national votes-to-seats allocation (Daxecker, 2020). Scholars have also highlighted variations in the constraints on actors to engage in violence, such as the institutional limits on the decisionmaking powers of the executive (Hafner-Burton, Hyde & Jablonski, 2014); the presence of international monitors (Daxecker, 2012, 2014; Asunka et al, 2017) or institutional weakness (Norris, Richard & Martínez i Coma, 2015; Salehyan & Linebarger, 2015).…”

Pre-election violence and territorial control: Political dominance and subnational election violence in polarized African electoral systems

“…Although most quantitative work on election violence has studied cross-national variation (Daxecker, 2014; Fjelde & Höglund, 2016; Fjelde, 2020; Hafner Burton, Hyde & Jablonski, 2014; Straus & Taylor, 2012; Taylor, Pevehouse & Straus, 2017; von Borzyskowski, 2019), several recent studies have concentrated on subnational dynamics of election-related conflict (e.g. Daxecker, 2020; Dercon & Guitérrez-Romero, 2012; Goldring & Wahman, 2018; Malik, 2018; Reeder & Seeberg, 2018). However, these studies do not theorize that competition plays a markedly different role at the subnational level than it does at the cross-national level.…”