Neeraj Prasad

Some studies show that voters punish parties for violence, while others find that violence can benefit politicians. We argue that core and swing 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 supporters of the incumbent party. Our study establishes the micro-foundations of support for violence in democracies.

Politicians frequently sponsor misinformation during election campaigns, but its effectiveness in shifting voters’ policy preferences and beliefs remains unclear. We argue that the efficacy of campaign misinformation depends on whether it latches onto partisan or non-partisan identities. Misinformation that primes non-partisan but politically relevant social identities could appeal to voters sharing these social identities, potentially moving supporters and non-supporters closer to the issue position of the sponsor of misinformation. If, on the other hand, misinformation is processed along partisan lines, it appeals only to existing supporters. Our empirical analysis is based on a pre-registered vignette experiment embedded in a representative post-election survey in India. Our design mimics the opposition’s use of campaign misinformation to polarize voters’ preferences and beliefs on issues of religion. We find that misinformation was only partly effective. While some co-partisans increased their support of the policy position advocated by the misinformer, messages failed to persuade non-supporters, and were easily corrected among co-partisans. We demonstrate the broader relevance of these results with a replication of campaign misinformation in the United States.

It is well established that democracies experience less political violence than autocracies. Paradoxically, however, this widely accepted fact has led scholars to overlook the existence of various forms of political violence within democracies. This special issue introduction article sees political violence as collective violence aimed at achieving political goal, encompassing electoral, ethnic, criminal, and terrorist violence. It reviews what we know about variation in political violence across democracies, which turns out to be surprisingly little. The article argues that normative preconceptions, rationalist theoretical traditions, and measurement challenges may explain gaps in our knowledge, such as insufficient attention to the strategies used by violent actors, the partisan and demographic determinants of support for violence, and the purpose of violence. We proceed to introducing the fourteen special issue articles, which study political violence with cutting-edge methodologies in the three most democratic regions in the world. The individual articles advance research in four key areas: (1) Strategies of violent actors to avoid the accountability constraints of democracy; (2) the actors sponsoring violence; (3) the effects of political violence in democracy; and (4) the debate on popular support for political violence. Addressing theoretical and methodological shortcomings in prior work, this introduction and special issue highlight that democracy – despite its many merits – was never quite as peaceful as it may have seemed.

Much research examines citizens’ beliefs in misinformation and whether these beliefs can be corrected, but we know far less about how misinformation impacts social attitudes. We propose that misinformation can induce affective shifts that increase outgroup animosity and fuel polarization. Politicians amplify these effects by embedding misinformation into larger narratives of threat from outgroups. We conduct a pre-registered vignette experiment following the 2021 elections in West Bengal, India, exposing respondents to a misinformation message that invokes salient identity cleavages. We randomize whether citizens are asked about intergroup attitudes before or after exposure to misinformation, and find that treated respondents report more hostile outgroup attitudes. Corrective information fails to mitigate these negative effects, suggesting that the effects of misinformation may not operate through citizens’ factual beliefs. While it is known that directional motives aid the proliferation of misinformation on social media, our study shows that misinformation itself can exacerbate social cleavages.