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The Resident-intruder Paradigm: A Standardized Test for Aggression, Violence and Social Stress
Published on: July 4, 2013
Engineered non-contestation: Deterring electoral contestation using violence in local elections.
1University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Journal of Peace Research
|September 29, 2025
Summary
Incumbents use political violence in local elections to deter opposition candidates, ensuring uncontested seats and establishing party dominance. This subverts democracy by manipulating electoral competition through localized violence.
Area of Science:
- Political Science
- Comparative Politics
- Democracy Studies
Background:
- Incumbents may subvert democracy by manipulating local elections.
- Political violence is a tool used to establish party dominance.
- Decentralization can create opportunities for subnational authoritarianism.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how incumbents use local elections and political violence to engineer non-contestation.
- To understand the role of local networks in political violence.
- To analyze the spatial unevenness of electoral competition.
Main Methods:
- Quantitative analysis of disaggregated data on competitiveness and uncontested seats in 3,000 local electoral units in West Bengal.
- Qualitative analysis of 60 interviews with political elites and non-elites.
Main Results:
- Increased political violence against the opposition in a local electoral unit correlates with a higher likelihood of seats going uncontested.
- Incumbents strategically target their strongholds for violence to ensure non-contestation.
- Qualitative data confirm that violence is a key method used by incumbents to engineer non-contested outcomes.
Conclusions:
- Political violence in local elections is an effective strategy for incumbents to subvert democracy and secure party dominance.
- Understanding subnational authoritarianism requires examining the interplay of political violence and electoral processes in decentralized contexts.
- The findings have significant implications for research on political violence and the persistence of authoritarian practices at subnational levels.
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