Engineered non-contestation: Deterring electoral contestation using violence in local elections

Abstract

How and why do incumbents use local elections as tools for subverting democracy and establishing party dominance? Integrating literatures on political violence and decentralization, this article argues that incumbents use violence to engineer non-contestation among opposition actors in local elections. Drawing on the strength of local networks, incumbents prioritize their own strongholds for such violence, leading candidates to withdraw and resulting in uncontested seats. I explore this argument with data on local elections from West Bengal, a state in India that has held local elections since the 1970s but where competition is spatially uneven, resulting in a significant number of uncontested seats. The theoretical expectations are tested with disaggregated data on competitiveness and uncontested seats for 3,000 local electoral units. The article finds that increased violence against the opposition in an electoral unit leads to seats going uncontested in that unit. I complement these findings with 60 qualitative interviews from political elites and non-elites, which indicate that violence is an important means through which incumbents engineer non-contestation. These findings have important implications for research on political violence and subnational authoritarianism, particularly in understanding the emergence and persistence of subnational authoritarianism in decentralized countries.