A Violent Win: How Conflict Affects Political Competition in India

ABSTRACT In this paper, we study the impact of group violence around elections on political competition, using administrative electoral data and geocoded data on violent events from India. Our identification relies on a novel instrumental variable— surplus males in districts, relative to women, in a subset of the adult population—for dealing with the endogeneity of violence. We find that violence in the run‐up to elections leads to a decline in political competition as indicated by a consolidation of votes by the winner. We provide suggestive evidence in favor of “voter intimidation” as the underlying channel driving these results.