Democracy Dismissed: When Leaders and Citizens Choose Election Violence

• In Event: Political Violence in Democracies

Abstract

In democratic settings, election violence is often is jointly produced: it relies on elite incentives and abilities to deploy violence, but equally, on the willingness of ordinary actors to participate. Yet many studies overlook this elite-citizen interaction, effectively black boxing the conditions and processes through which elites mobilize people to fight. This paper introduces and advances the concept of the joint production of election violence. A theory of joint production considers the process through which elites and ordinary citizens come together to produce violence, asking how, when, and for whom election-related violence becomes thinkable and feasible. The concept also complicates the assumption that supporters are ready and willing to use violence, and instead, specifies how elites coordinate with ordinary actors, including the narratives and appeals that are used to legitimise violence, and the infrastructural support that makes violence feasible. Using the U.S, Kenya, Nigeria, and India and illustrative case studies, alongside cross-national data on the incidence of jointly produced violence, this paper aims to provide a framework that can help facilitate more systematic analyses of elite-citizen interactions in the context of electoral violence, especially in democratic regimes.

Author

• Kathleen Klaus, Uppsala University