Presentation groups

Starter questions

Harbers, Richetta, and van Wingerden (2022) - concepts

electoral violence (p. 3): “coercion directed towards actors and/or objects during the electoral cycle … part of a menu of electoral manipulation, which includes threats and coercion targeting voters, candidates and officials involved in the process”

Harbers, Richetta, and van Wingerden (2022) - concepts

• intra-systemic violence
  • “try to win under the existing system”
  • “suppress or drown out the voices of political opponents”
• anti-systemic violence
  • “burn down the house and alter the status quo”
  • “depress participation as much as possible in order to undermine the legitimacy of the election”
• examples from cases? any difference in the form of violence? applicable beyond modern democracies? (e.g., KKK, Wilson, and The Birth of a Nation)

Harbers, Richetta, and van Wingerden (2022) - concepts

• intra-systemic violence

• anti-systemic violence

• examples from cases? any difference in the form of violence?

  • intra-systemic: riots or group clashes between party supporters and violent attacks on candidates, politicians or voters. … ‘booth capture’, where armed goons take over polling places
  • anti-systemic: coercion of or threats against candidates, voters, poll workers or security, as well as destruction of election infrastructure

intra-systemic violence (left) and anti-systemic violence (right) in India, 1985-2008

Harbers, Richetta, and van Wingerden (2022) - design

• research aim: looking at sub-national election-related violence in India: what effect on electoral outcomes (DVs: turnout, incumbent vote percentage) does violence before elections (IV) have?
• Method: series of fixed-effects and Poisson regression models
  • \(\hookrightarrow\) fixed-effects - intercept of model varies across units/cases to control for unvarying attributes of specific units/cases
  • \(\hookrightarrow\) Poisson - often used to model ‘count’ data
• Data (collection procedure detailed on p. 8):
  • Times of India (ToI) new reports, sub-national elections
  • Unit of analysis/case: constituency-year
  • coded: violence intra-systemic or part of armed group’s tactic

Reg table, DV: turnout

what findings can you pick out?

Reg table, DV: incumbent vote

what findings can you pick out?

Harbers, Richetta, and van Wingerden (2022) - conclusions

• violence decreases turnout but that the effect is larger for anti-systemic violence
• intra-systemic violence appears intended to selectively depress turnout among opposition supporters
• anti-systemic violence “extremely effective in terms of keeping voters away from the polls and thus discrediting the electoral results due to low participation rates”
  • ethics question: qualms about reporting this finding?

• open data on subnational violence: Zhukov, Davenport, and Kostyuk (2019)

Background: study of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011)

Background: study of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011)

Background: study of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011)

Pay attention to the mechanisms that Prof. Chenoweth specifies in her brief explanation

Background: study of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011)

Pay attention to the mechanisms that Prof. Chenoweth specifies in her brief explanation

• nonviolent campaigns are better at eliciting broad and diverse support
• nonviolent campaigns create more defections among the opposition
• nonviolent campaigns have a broader set of tactics at their disposal
• nonviolent campaigns often maintain discipline even in the face of escalating oppression

Kudelia (2018) - refining Chenoweth and Stephan (2011)

• Ukraine’s Euromaidan
  • what’s going on in this case?
    • Yanukovych’s regime: semi-authoritarian

Kudelia (2018) - refining Chenoweth and Stephan (2011)

• Ukraine’s Euromaidan
  • what’s going on in this case?
    • Yanukovych’s regime: semi-authoritarian
• violent protests occurred…
  • but accounted for just 12 percent of all protests
  • yet concentrated in final month (Jan.-Feb. 2014) and in Kyiv

“The success of violent protest tactics in Ukraine’s case, puzzling from the standpoint of recent findings, has received no systematic, theoretically-driven scholarly treatment.”

• violent tactics effective - is it puzzling? (cf. Chenoweth and Stephan 2011)

(empirically, theoretically) puzzling or not…

• Kudelia (2018) - within-case qualitative process tracing of “actors’ choices using a rationalist theoretical”
  • rationalist = strategic choice rather than spontaneous reaction

(counter-)productive effects of violence - Kudelia (2018)

• violence counter-productive
  1. alienate current and potential supporters
  2. provoke a coercive response
  3. dampen international support for protests
• violence productive
  1. participatory character of protest violence
  2. embeddedness of violent groups and practices in a generally non-violent movement (radical flanks)
  3. capacity and willingness of violent activists to escalate beyond the cost-tolerance threshold of the regime
     • i.e., how much will regime tolerate? will it offer concessions?

Kudelia (2018) - findings

• violence complementing already and continuing high mobilisation is effective in making regime more sensitive to protest costs
• “a regime’s repressive escalation may decrease net participation costs by broadening support for militants among rank-and-file protesters and outside sympathizers”
• two-tiered orgs.: a violent vanguard and a non-violent base
  • strengthens the leverage of moderate opposition elites in bargaining with the regime
  • when used in conjunction with non-violent actions in response to intensifying repression, it may deter the regime or even tip the balance of power against it.
• your thoughts on these findings?

Concluding discussion

Relationship across a movement: