Publications

How and why do incumbents use local elections as tools for subverting democracy and establishing party dominance? Integrating literatures on political violence, and decentralization, I argue that incumbents rely on violence to bar opposition candidates from contesting in local elections. Drawing on the strength of local networks, incumbents prioritize their own strongholds for such coercion, which leads candidates to withdraw and seats go uncontested. I explore my argument with data on local elections from West Bengal. A state in India that has held elections at the local level since the 1970s, but where competition is spatially uneven, resulting in a significant number of uncontested seats. I test my theoretical expectations with disaggregated data on competitiveness and uncontested seats for more than 3,000 local electoral units. My results show that incumbent-controlled units have a greater probability of going uncontested. I complement these findings with qualitative interviews from political elites and non-elites, which show that violence is the mechanism through which incumbents establish local dominance. These findings have important implications for work on decentralization and subnational authoritarianism.

This dissertation chapter investigates how incumbent parties mobilize local actors to orchestrate election violence and explores why these collaborations vary across electoral contexts. Building on earlier findings that incumbents use violence to consolidate control in strongholds or expand influence in competitive districts, this chapter argues that strategies of violence are shaped by the local actors incumbents can leverage. In strongholds, violence is typically enforced by local strongmen targeting opposition figures, whereas in competitive areas, local party workers undermine rivals by creating voter insecurity. Drawing on six months of fieldwork in West Bengal, including 60 in-depth interviews, I conduct a plausibility probe to assess how incumbents adapt violence to local conditions. This evidence supports the central claim that incumbents form distinct alliances to orchestrate violence, leveraging local power brokers in strongholds and party workers in competitive districts. By illustrating the roles of these actors in either consolidating or expanding control, the findings underscore how local-level collaborations shape broader patterns of electoral violence. The plausibility probe also highlights avenues for further research, suggesting that this strategic use of local networks merits deeper investigation to rigorously test causal mechanisms and refine our understanding of subnational electoral dynamics.

Although there is widespread agreement on the importance of political elites for democratic backsliding, they have received limited scholarly attention. Elites are harder to access than citizens, and the behavioralist paradigm has incentivized scholars to rely on public opinion research. Nevertheless, understanding why some politicians undermine democratic institutions once in power, while others in similar circumstances do not, remains a critical question in the study of democratic erosion. We address this question by examining how committed political elites are to democracy and why that is the case. Our study focuses on India, a country that has experienced significant democratic backsliding over the past decade. Using a survey of 300 politicians—comprising both winning and losing MPs and MLAs—across four Indian states, we investigate politicians’ commitment to three dimensions of democracy: electoral, liberal, and egalitarian. Additionally, we explore how politicians’ social backgrounds, networks, pathways into politics, and criminal track records shape their adherence to democratic norms. One of our core hypotheses is that while elites may express abstract support for democracy, they often fail to uphold its principles in the realities of day-to-day politics. To capture this gap, our survey includes questions on abstract democratic principles (e.g., the protection of freedom of expression during crises) as well as their concrete manifestations in the Indian context (e.g., the raiding of a news agency’s office). By studying the origins and different dimensions of politicians’ support for democracy, our research offers new insights into the mechanisms of democratic erosion and the role of elites in safeguarding—or undermining—democratic institution.

This paper examines the use of misinformation for polarizing voters on a radical new issue. While political parties routinely employ misinformation, its strategic purpose and effectiveness are not well understood. Drawing on work on issue entrepreneurship and polarization, we propose that opposition parties are most likely to rely on misinformation as a strategy to introduce radical new policy positions. Disadvantaged by the status quo of issue competition, opposition parties hope radical issues will polarize the electorate and draw in new voters. Misinformation is an attractive strategy for doing so because it is available to outsiders, allows for direct communication with voters, and circumvents traditional media and gatekeepers. Our empirical analysis draws on a pre-registered vignette experiment embedded in a representative survey conducted after West Bengal’s 2021 elections. In this election, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sought to polarize voters on the state government’s role on religion. While a majority of voters preferred a secular government, the opposition spread false news alleging government favoritism towards religious out-groups, aiming to polarize voters into secular and majoritarian camps. Our experimental design mimics this strategy, randomly exposing subsets of voters to claims about out-group favoritism, in-group favoritism, correction treatments, and a control condition. We find that misinformation failed, for several reasons. First, the new issue reinforced partisan cleavages instead of cutting across them, persuading only BJP voters. Second, among BJP supporters, misinformation convinced only a subset of voters, effectively splitting the party into two camps. Finally, while some BJP voters were initially swayed by misinformation, they reverted back to secularism when exposed to a correction. Our study illustrates the incentives behind misinformation and the conditions under which it is likely to work, clarifying the supply-side dynamics of political misinformation.          

Some studies show that voters punish parties for violence, while others find that violence can benefit politicians. We argue that core and likely voters support rather than punish violence by co-partisans under some conditions. Parties aim to benefit from violence by portraying it as a response to a threat, provocation, or injustice by an out-group or rival party. Once legitimized by politicians, voters support violence by co-partisans and punish them for peaceful responses. We test our argument with preregistered vignette experiments in a representative survey during the 2022 elections in Uttar Pradesh, India. Our findings support expectations; respondents are more likely to support violence and approve of parties involved in it when it is legitimized. These effects are driven by Hindus as the majority group, in particular core and likely supporters of the incumbent party. Our study establishes the micro-foundations of support for violence in democracies      

What explains variation in electoral violence intensity? I argue that variation in the intensity of electoral violence can be attributed to unequal financial capacity among incumbents, driven by the uneven distribution of rent in decentralized contexts. In high-rent areas, incumbents are incentivized and financially equipped to undermine elections with large-scale violence to maintain access to rent. Conversely, incumbents in low-rent areas, with weaker financial resources and incentives, tend to resort to low-intensity violence. I argue that the intensity of violence is largely shaped by the actors hired by incumbents. Violence specialists, with their capacity for organized and extensive violence, are associated with high-intensity electoral violence, while party supporters typically carry out low-intensity violence. To test this argument, I utilized a novel dataset comprising electoral violence events from the 2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019 Nigerian elections, with fiscal data from Nigeria’s thirty-six states. Additionally, I conducted over 100 interviews in  high and low rents states, specifically Rivers, Plateau, Lagos, and Nasarawa, with politicians, journalists, civil society members, and ordinary voters to uncover the causal mechanisms. The findings reveal a positive correlation between rents and the intensity of electoral violence. These results provide relevant insights into the patterns of subnational electoral violence and highlight the link between resource distribution and electoral violence.

Incumbents often sponsor violence in elections but do not typically engage in it themselves, instead delegating violence to security forces, armed groups, party wings, or regular citizens. This variation is poorly explained by existing theory, which has privileged incumbents’ incentives to plausibly deny their involvement. What explains variation in incumbents’ choice of violent perpetrator? This paper develops a novel theory centered around unevenness in incumbents’ access to rents. Pitched at the subnational level, I argue that variation in rents helps explain why some incumbents recruit violence specialists while others rely on co-ethnics or party supporters. Incumbents with access to large rent can afford to hire costly yet effective violence specialists. In contrast, those with limited rent recruit cheaper but less capable alternatives such as co-ethnics and party supporters. I probe the plausibility of the argument with over 100 interviews conducted with politicians, journalists, voters, civil society members, and party supporters in three Nigerian states: Lagos, Rivers, and Nasarawa. I  triangulate interview findings with newspapers and observer reports. Findings show that in Lagos and Rivers, incumbents hire violence specialists such as transport workers and cult groups because have access to large rent, while those in the low rent state of Nasarawa must rely on party supporters to perpetuate violence. The study contributes to the literatures on decentralization, joint production of political violence, and the resource curse.

It is well known that political violence hardens existing political identities. Departing from conventional wisdom, we argue that violence can be used to transform rather than maintain partisan identities and preferences. We propose that political parties can sponsor violence around a secondary cleavage – that is, a hitherto politically inactive social cleavage – to establish a relationship with those sharing the social identity. Exposure to violence leads citizens to identify more closely with the secondary identity, become more hostile towards the out-group on the secondary cleavage dimension, and shift electoral support towards the sponsors of violence. We explore the empirical implications of our argument in India, relying on the subnational expansion of India’s largest party and its sponsorship of violent religious rallies as a test case. To demonstrate the effects of violence on voting, we compare vote shares in polling stations witnessing violent rallies before elections to those experiencing them after. Results show that vote shares for the sponsors of violence increase in locations with violence before elections. We establish causal mechanisms through an original survey along the routes of violent rallies and a qualitative analysis of politicians’ campaign narratives. We find that exposure to violence increases identification with the secondary identity and intergroup polarization; moreover, political parties use violence to appeal to voters sharing the social identity. Our findings establish violence as a tool for identity transformation.