Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Mares, Isabela

Abstract

This dissertation sheds new light on the causes of political violence as well as its consequences for democratic competition, focusing on Western democracies. My first essay examines the interplay of policing, political violence and democratic backsliding in Weimar Germany. It establishes that the preferences and incentives of law enforcement officials are central to understanding variation in political violence in this context. The essay combines original quantitative data on law enforcement staffing and party mobilization efforts with secondary data on incidents of lethal political violence and electoral outcomes to build an original county-level panel dataset for the German state of Prussia, covering the period from 1917 to 1932. Applying difference-in-differences analysis, I show that the replacement of reactionary law enforcement officials with officials appointed and vetted by democratic reformers caused (i) a reduction in political violence, (ii) lower entry by Nazi candidates in elections and (iii) higher vote shares for pro-democratic parties at the expense of anti-democratic parties. Qualitative evidence suggests that reactionary law enforcement officials undermined policing of anti-democratic extremist actors, giving extremist parties and their affiliates cover to develop campaigns and party structures and to engage in political violence targeting their opponents. In the remainder of the dissertation, I shift my focus to the contemporary United States, where threats of violence against citizens competing for and serving in public office have increased in frequency and intensity. Building on an original survey of U.S. citizens with an embedded information provision experiment, I investigate the consequences of this phenomenon, focusing on entry into politics and representation. The second essay argues that violence threatens to reverse recent gains in representation for women, queer, and non-white citizens who have historically been marginalized in electoral politics. I document that marginalized individuals on average hold more pessimistic beliefs regarding the safety risks associated with political careers than non-marginalized individuals. These beliefs have important consequences: Exposure to belief-correcting information that provides reassurance regarding safety risks causes an increase in stated willingness to run for political office. Moreover, I show that individuals become more supportive of their peers entering politics when concerns about exposure to violence are mitigated, especially so when said peers are from a marginalized community. The third and final essay investigates whether my intervention designed to alleviate fears about exposure to political violence can contribute to reducing polarization. The essay theorizes about the impact of the intervention on two dimensions of polarization. At the individual level, I theorize that the intervention should have a particularly strong effect on political ambition among weaker partisans by lowering perceived entry costs and alleviating concerns about intra-party factional conflict. At the aggregate level, I theorize that the intervention should have a particularly strong effect on Democrats [Republicans] in Republican [Democratic] party enclaves, as socio-political isolation in a community amplifies concerns about personal safety. I find that the positive effect of my intervention on political ambition is indeed concentrated among individuals displaying weaker partisan affect. Contrary to expectations, however, the effects of the intervention are most pronounced in swing counties rather than counties with strong partisan leanings. I conjecture that past exposure to intense campaigns concretizes – and thus increases the salience of – concerns regarding exposure to violence.

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