Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Wilkinson, Steven
Abstract
Armed political parties have contested elections in myriad democracies. However, prior scholarship does not conceptually distinguish these parties from other categories of organized violence, nor does existing research account for micro-level variation in armed parties’ attacks against partisan rivals. The first chapter in my dissertation conceptually-differentiates armed political parties from other forms of organized violence, including autonomous rebel organizations and party- backed riot networks. In the second chapter, I develop a micro-level theory which explains armed party violence against partisan rivals. I contend that armed parties’ pre- and post-election attacks against rivals intend to consolidate local monopolies over electoral competition and policymaking via territorial control. Local variation in this control-consolidating violence depends on whether locally-elected incumbents belong to the government’s ruling party—i.e., the party controlling the level of government with authority over frontline bureaucrats and local police. Ruling party alignment increases local incumbents’ attacks by bolstering the party’s capacity to perpetrate attacks and reducing constraints posed by state institutions. The third chapter tests the relationship between ruling party alignment and armed party violence with a regression discontinuity design and a new dataset I constructed to measure armed party violence in West Bengal, India. The fourth chapter sheds light on parties’ strategic preferences and demonstrates the plausibility of my proposed causal mechanisms by drawing upon extensive qualitative evidence, including eighty interviews I conducted in West Bengal with armed parties’ local leaders, party workers, and members of civil society. The fifth chapter further tests causal mechanisms with a medium-n analysis of violence, territorial control, and ruling party alignment in eight legislative assembly constituencies in West Bengal over a twenty year period. In the sixth chapter, I analyze how ruling party alignment affected armed party violence in post-U.S. Civil War Louisiana, a context where, unlike West Bengal and other electoral settings, only one party could be classified as “armed” and others lacked coercive capacity. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for existing research on political violence and democratic backsliding, as well as the lessons that this dissertation provides to practitioners.
Recommended Citation
Stommes, Drew, "Armed Political Parties and Their Violence" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1304.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1304
