Collaborators: H Zeynep Bultugil, Ursula Daxecker, Andrea Ruggeri
My research on democracy and violence examines how electoral competition unfolds under the shadow of violence. I study how political actors deploy, mitigate, and adapt to violence within democratic settings, and how these dynamics shape representation. Combining comparative perspectives with surveys, experimental research, and qualitative analysis, my work investigates the logic of political violence in democracies.
The first article in this line of research, “Inequality and Communal Riots in India,” co-authored with H. Zeynep Bulutgil and published in the Journal of Peace Research, examines how patterns of economic inequality shape the incidence of communal riots. It advances an instrumental account of violence, arguing that ethnonationalist politicians mobilize conflict when shifting economic conditions weaken ethnic identification and threaten their political base. Drawing on statistical evidence from districts across India and an in-depth analysis of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, the paper links economic structures to the strategic use of violence in democratic competition. Beyond advancing theories of ethnic conflict, it conceptualizes communal riots as a distinct class of political violence—smaller in scale but integral to the maintenance of competitive politics in divided societies. The article’s replication data are publicly available through JPR’s archive. The findings have been featured in The Telegraph (India) and 3Streams, and discussed in a University of Amsterdam interview titled “Political elites (sometimes) incite violence to strengthen group identity.”
Building on this foundation, my next project turned to the demand side of political violence—examining when and why citizens endorse violent tactics by political parties. In “Demanding Violence, Punishing Peace: Support for Party Violence in India,” co-authored with Ursula Daxecker and published in The Journal of Politics, we argue that voters support, rather than punish, violence by co-partisans when it is framed as a legitimate response to threat, provocation, or injustice. Drawing on pre-registered vignette experiments embedded in a representative survey during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh elections, the study finds that both core and swing voters are more likely to approve of party violence when it is justified by political elites, and to penalize peaceful responses. By establishing the micro-foundations of popular support for violence, the paper contributes to understanding how coercive strategies gain legitimacy in democratic politics. The study’s replication data are publicly available, and it received the 2025 Stephen P. Cohen Best Paper Award from the International Studies Association. The findings were also featured in a London School of Economics (LSE) USAPP Blogpost, underscoring their broader implications for the normalization of violence in competitive democracies.
Alongside my research, I have been actively involved in building scholarly communities around the study of democracy and violence. In 2021 and 2022, I co-organized two international workshops—Elections and Violence: New Research on Actors, Targets, and Strategies and Elections and Violence: Political Violence and Electoral Politics—which together featured over thirty papers from scholars across multiple regions and fostered sustained exchange on how violence intersects with democratic competition, party strategy, and voter behaviour. I am also a founding member of the Violence, Instability, and Peace (VIP) Forum, a virtual platform for scholars studying conflict, protest, crime, peace, and related topics to present and receive feedback on research-in-progress, including working papers and pre-analysis plans. Building on this collaborative momentum, I co-edited a special issue on Democracy and Violence for the Journal of Peace Research with Andrea Ruggeri and Ursula Daxecker. From over 230 proposals, we curated sixteen papers for an in-person, fully funded workshop in Amsterdam and ultimately published fourteen articles representing twelve countries. In our introduction article, “Political Violence in Democracies: An Introduction,” we argued that while democracies experience less violence than autocracies, they are far from peaceful. The special issue advances understanding of the strategies of violent actors, the sponsors and effects of political violence, and the conditions under which citizens tolerate or condemn it—challenging the assumption that democracy and violence are antithetical. I also regularly participate in field-building and policy forums, including the 2022 Political Violence and Democratic Backsliding Conference at WZB, Misinformation and Polarisation in Indian Election Campaigns at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (YouTube Link), and Europe’s Rightward Shift at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi (YouTube Link), contributing to global discussions on democratic resilience and political violence.
Neeraj Prasad 