Armed Parties, the State, and the Consolidation of Local Political Order

Armed political parties carry out violence targeting partisan rivals before and after elections. However, their attacks often occur at drastically different rates in otherwise similar neighboring localities. I argue that partisan alignment between local armed party officeholders and a government's ruling party—i.e., the party controlling the level of government with authority over frontline bureaucrats—significantly increases those local incumbents' attacks within the locality. Alignment facilitates local officeholders' accumulation of non-state coercive capacity and reduces the constraints they face from the state. I test this theory with a close elections regression discontinuity design and new data on election violence in West Bengal, India. I find support for the proposed mechanisms with qualitative evidence including eighty interviews conducted in urban and rural West Bengal. The findings shed light on how differential access to the state shapes local patterns of non-state violence and sharpens our understanding of bottom-up pathways to single party rule.