Unequal votes, unequal violence: Malapportionment and election violence in India
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319884985 |
| Date | 01 January 2020 |
| Published date | 01 January 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Unequal votes, unequal violence:
Malapportionment and election
violence in India
Ursula Daxecker
Department of Political Science & Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam
Abstract
Elections held outside of ad vanced, industrialized democracies can turn viole nt because elites use coerc ion 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 discre-
pancy 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 over-
represented districts present fewer incentives for using violence. In contrast, elites in well-apportioned or under-
represented 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 malapportion-
ment 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 appor-
tioned 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.
Keywords
disaggregation, election violence, electoral competition, electoral manipulation, India, malapportionment
Introduction
Violence during elections is a form of manipulation
intended to affect election outcomes, and still occurs
routinely outside of advanced, industrialized democra-
cies. The intent of campaign violence is to influence the
dynamics of electoral competition, in particular to
reduce turnout among opponents (Bratton, 2008; Coll-
ier & Vicente, 2012). If violence is used strategically to
demobilize opponents, it follows that parties should be
most interested in deploying violence in areas where it
matters most, such as locations where they are concerned
about losing. Yet how do parties determine which areas
will be closely contested? Existing work has assumed that
parties infer competitiveness from previous performance
or partisan preferences. I argue instead that parties, in
particular local incumbents , also benefit from institu-
tional biases that affect the demand for violence. Proce-
dural or institutional biases such as the unfair
apportionment of electoral districts have been neglected
in the literature, despite having important implications
for whether and where violence is an attractive tool to
influence election outcomes.
Corresponding author:
u.daxecker@uva.nl
Journal of Peace Research
2020, Vol. 57(1) 156–170
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319884985
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