Electoral Competitiveness and Election Violence: Long-Term, Large-N, Within-Country Evidence From England and Wales, 1832-1914
P2-02
Presented by: Patrick Kuhn
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.