Do Parties Matter for Ethnic Violence? Evidence From India
@article{Nellis2016DoPM, title={Do Parties Matter for Ethnic Violence? Evidence From India}, author={Gareth Nellis and Michael Weaver and Steven C. Rosenzweig}, journal={Quarterly Journal of Political Science}, year={2016}, volume={11}, pages={249-277} }
Ethnic group conflict is among the most serious threats facing young democracies. In this paper, we investigate whether the partisanship of incumbent politicians affects the incidence and severity of local ethnic violence. Using a novel application of the regression-discontinuity design, we show that as-if random victory by candidates representing India's Congress party in close state assembly elections between 1962 and 2000 reduced Hindu–Muslim rioting. The effects are large. Simulations…
Figures and Tables from this paper
14 Citations
The Association of Electoral Volatility and Religious Riots in India
- Political SciencePolitics and Religion
- 2021
Abstract Why are religious riots between Hindus and Muslims endemic in some states of India and not in others? Scholarship on the topic is divided between those arguing that electoral competition…
Hindu–Muslim violence in unexpected places: theory and evidence from rural India
- Economics
- 2019
ABSTRACT What factors explain the recent rise of Hindu–Muslim violence in rural India? Using the 2013 communal riots that broke out in Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts as a…
Electoral violence: An introduction
- Political Science
- 2020
Elections are held in nearly all countries in the contemporary world. Yet despite their aim of allowing for peaceful transfers of power, elections held outside of consolidated democracies are often…
Electoral support and militants’ targeting strategies
- Political ScienceJournal of Peace Research
- 2021
Militant groups that are in armed conflict with a government often coexist with political parties that have ethnic or ideological connections to them. In this article, we explore the extent to which…
Orchestrating silence, winning the votes: Explaining variation in media freedom during elections
- Political Science, Economics
- 2020
Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case
- Political SciencePerspectives on Politics
- 2021
In the study of electoral politics and political behavior in the developing world, India is often considered to be an exemplar of the centrality of contingency in distributive politics, the role of…
National or Sub-National Parties: Does Party Geographic Scope Matter?
- Political Science, EconomicsJournal of Development Economics
- 2020
In many developing countries, local elections are increasingly dominated by political parties with a local or regional scope. This paper examines whether the geographic scope of a ruling party…
“Fight, Die, and If Required Kill”: Hindu Nationalism, Misinformation, and Islamophobia in India
- SociologyReligions
- 2022
This article provides a deep dive into several recent cases of majoritarian hate speech and violence perpetrated against Muslims in India. We first provide an introduction to Hindutva as a social…
Hindu-Muslim Violence in India: A Postscript from the Twenty-First Century
- Political ScienceAdvances in the Economics of Religion
- 2019
The importance of religious conflict today can hardly be overstated. The appalling situation in Syria—stemming from the activism of the Islamic State (ISIS)—is just one cruel reminder of the utter…
Neoliberalism and the “Growth Perspective”
- EconomicsFrom Developmentalism to Neoliberalism
- 2019
This chapter analyses the rightward shift in Indian politics since the 1980s in the context of the structural changes brought about by the neoliberal economic reforms.
References
SHOWING 1-10 OF 66 REFERENCES
The Political Logic of Ethnic Violence
- Political Science
- 2012
Ethnic violence in Gujarat in 2002 killed at least a thousand Muslims. Compiling data from the Times of India, we investigate variation across 216 towns and rural areas. Analysis reveals the…
When State Responses Fail: Religion and Secessionism in India 1952--2002
- Sociology
- 2012
Why are some challenges to the territorial unity of democratic states more tractable than others? The literature has focused on numerous explanatory factors, including the impact of institutional…
Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State
- Political Science
- 2011
On 27 February 2002 fifty-eight people died when a train coach caught Western India. The incident marked the beginning of one of the worst outbursts of Hindu-Muslim violence since India's…
The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict
- Sociology
- 1992
This study of ethnic violence in the United States from 1877 to 1914 reveals that not all ethnic groups were equally likely to be victims of violence; the author seeks the reasons for this historical…
Political Engineering and Party Politics in Conflict-Prone Societies
- Political Science, Sociology
- 2006
Comparative scholarship suggests that democracy in ethnically-diverse societies is likely to be fostered by the development of broad-based, aggregative, and multi-ethnic political parties, rather…
Islamic Rule and the Empowerment of the Poor and Pious
- Political Science
- 2014
Does Islamic political control affect women's empowerment? Several countries have recently experienced Islamic parties coming to power through democratic elections. Due to strong support among…
Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity
- SociologyInternational Organization
- 2000
We examine the theoretical implications of the observation that ethnic identities are socially constructed for explaining ethnic violence, distinguishing between two classes of mechanisms. If…
Electoral Control in New Democracies: The Perverse Incentives of Fluid Party Systems
- Political Science
- 2005
How do fiuid party systems that exist in many new democracies affect democratic accountability? To address this question, the authors analyze a new database of all legislative incumbents and all…
Implications of an Economic Theory of Conflict: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India
- EconomicsJournal of Political Economy
- 2014
We model intergroup conflict driven by economic changes within groups. We show that if group incomes are low, increasing group incomes raises violence against that group and lowers violence generated…
The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics
- EconomicsThe Journal of Politics
- 1996
We examine what determines whether an interest group will receive favors in pork-barrel politics, using a model of majority voting with two competing parties. Each group's membership is heterogeneous…