11:20 - 13:00
P2
Room: Terrace 2B
Panel Session 2
Daniela Donno - Competing Verdicts: Multiple Election Monitors and Post-Election Violence
Gidon Cohen - Can Professionalization of the Police Curb Election Violence? Evidence From 19th Century England and Wales
Neeraj Prasad - Violence as an Electoral Strategy: Booth-Level Evidence from West Bengal, India
Giacomo Lemoli - Ethnic media, repression, and the mobilization of national identity
Patrick Kuhn - Electoral Competitiveness and Election Violence: Long-Term, Large-N, Within-Country Evidence From England and Wales, 1832-1914
Electoral Competitiveness and Election Violence: Long-Term, Large-N, Within-Country Evidence From England and Wales, 1832-1914
P2-02
Presented by: Patrick Kuhn
Patrick Kuhn, Luke Blaxill, Gidon Cohen, Gary Hutchison, Nick Vivyan
Durham University
While competitive elections in some contexts remain a peaceful affair, similarly competitive elections in other contexts spark violence. Existing research aiming to explain this variation highlights institutional and societal differences between contexts, but is mostly forced to rely on short time series and cross-national comparisons. Using an original dataset compiled from historical newspaper and parliamentary committee reports on election-related violent events for all 20 general elections in England and Wales between 1832-1914, we investigate the strength and variation of the relationship between electoral competitiveness and violence. Exploiting ex- tensive temporal and within-country variation, we find that competitiveness was strongly, robustly, and positively associated with more candidate-driven, strategic forms of election violence initially, but that this relationship breaks down in the late 19th-century, where the number of violent events drastically declined while electoral competitiveness remained high. Investigating the causes for this decline, we rule out several mechanisms commonly associated with a decline in election violence and thereby narrow down the set of institutional changes that could account for the decoupling of electoral competitiveness and violence. Our findings contribute to debates within the electoral violence and 19th-century British political development literatures, as well as the burgeoning literature on election-violence prevention strategies.