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 goals, 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 14 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 out-group animosity and fuel polarization. Politicians amplify these effects by embedding misinformation into larger narratives of threat from out-groups. We conduct a preregistered 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 out-group 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.

This study presents new theory and evidence on the repertoire of electoral intimidation, suggesting that threats can be used to deter rival party supporters from voting but also to mobilize citizens to vote for a particular party. We expect these strategies to unfold in the same electoral context, but differ in targeting and incidence; while threats to demobilize are concentrated in closely contested areas and occur more frequently overall, threats to mobilize target fewer voters and are centered in parties’ own strongholds. Recognizing the difficulty of surveying citizens about sensitive experiences, we combine qualitative material from local news with evidence from a list experiment embedded in an original survey conducted after the 2019 elections in the Indian state of West Bengal. Our empirical findings corroborate our expectations: areas without overt violence may nevertheless be highly coercive, underlining the importance of studying the full repertoire of electoral violence.

Election violence is often conceptualized as a form of coercive campaigning, but the literature has not fully explored how electoral institutions shape incentives for competition and violence. We argue that the logic of subnational electoral competition – and with it incentives for violence – differs in presidential and legislative elections. In presidential elections, national-level considerations dominate incentives for violence. Presidential elections are usually decided by winning a majority of votes in a single, national district, incentivizing parties to demobilize voters with violence in strongholds. In contrast, election violence is subject to district-level incentives in legislative elections. District-level incentives imply that parties focus on winning the majority of districts, and therefore center violent campaigning on the most competitive districts. We test our argument with georeferenced, constituency-level data from Zimbabwe, a case that fits our scope conditions of holding competitive elections, violence by the incumbent, and majoritarian electoral rule. We find that most violence takes place in strongholds in presidential elections, especially in opposition strongholds. In contrast, competitive constituencies are targeted in legislative contests.

There is a widespread perception that we are witnessing a period of democratic decline, manifesting itself in varieties of democratic backsliding such as the manipulation of elections, marginalization and repression of regime opponents and minorities, or more incremental executive aggrandizement. Yet others are more optimistic and have argued that democracy is in fact resilient, or that we are observing coinciding trends of democratic decline but also expansion. This forum highlights key issues in the debate on democracy's decline, which center on conceptual and measurement issues, agreement on the phenomenon but not its nature or severity, the importance of international factors, the emphasis we should put on political elites versus citizens, and the consequences of backsliding for global politics. Staffan I. Lindberg provides an empirical perspective on the scope and severity of democracy's decline, and argues that polarization and misinformation are important drivers for this current wave of autocratization. Susan D. Hyde highlights the detrimental consequences of reduced support for democracy by the international community, which has affected civil society organizations-important arbiters of democracy-especially severely. Challenging some of these conclusions, Irfan Nooruddin claims that any gains for democracy after the end of the Cold War were short-lived, failing to sustain democracy because of an overemphasis on elections and a disregard for structural factors. Finally, Larry M. Bartels argues that we need to look to political elites and not citizens if we want to protect democracy in the United States and elsewhere, which has important implications for how we study democracy and its challenges.

What are the consequences of election violence for citizens’ political attitudes? We argue that in polarized contexts, citizens’ interpretation of electoral violence depends on their partisan affiliations. When presented with information alleging co-partisans’ involvement in violence, people with strong partisan identities become more likely to assert that elections were free and fair. We test this expectation with a vignette experiment in West Bengal after India’s 2019 elections, presenting respondents with information about violence while varying the partisan identity of the perpetrator. Consistent with expectations, supporters of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) increased their evaluations of election quality when hearing about co-partisan violence. We find no evidence of disconfirmation bias for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters; their recent shift to the party plausibly explains this finding.

Election violence is common in many developing countries and has potentially detrimental implications for democratic consolidation. Drawing on political psychology, we argue that citizens’ fear of campaign violence undermines support for democracy while increasing support for autocracy. Using individual-level survey data from 21 electoral democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa, we find robust support for our argument. Citizens fearing campaign violence are less likely to support democracy and multi-party competition, more likely to favor a return to autocracy, and less likely to turn out to vote. Our findings have important implications for democratic survival and provide further impetus for reducing electoral violence.

This chapter begins by describing pirates and their organizations. It provides a sketch of “typical” pirate organizations in countries such as Indonesia, Somalia, and Nigeria. The chapter then proceeds to explore pirate activity. It describes the Maritime Piracy Event and Location Dataset (MPELD) and compares and contrasts these data with other databases on modern sea piracy. Next, the chapter uses the data to illustrate geographic and temporal patterns of maritime piracy. The last section of the chapter provides assessments of key determinants of piracy mentioned in the literature. These empirical patterns provide a basic picture of contemporary maritime piracy.

This chapter offers comparisons of historical and contemporary maritime piracy. It examines the conditions that have driven commerce raiding in the past and the present, which include political violence, privation, geographic opportunity, and governance. The chapter notes that imperial competition, legitimacy gaps, and capacity limits drove privateering and piracy up through the nineteenth century. But while legitimacy gaps and capacity limits continue to incentivize piracy today, weak capacity and lack of legitimacy originate within states rather than states being unable to control and regulate the world’s oceans. Contemporary pirates collude with corruptible local elites rather than with far-off imperial powers. The chapter concludes that historical piracy was often an extension of regime capability, while modern pirates stand in opposition to central state power even as they partner with local governance actors to plunder transiting ships.

Maritime piracy—like civil war, terrorism, and organized crime—is a problem of weak states. Surprisingly, though, pirates do not operate in the least-governed areas of weak states. Pirate Lands addresses this puzzle by explaining why some coastal communities experience more pirate attacks in their vicinity than others. Pirates do well in places where elites and law enforcement can be bribed, but they also need access to functioning roads, ports, and markets. Using statistical analyses of cross-national and subnational data on pirate attacks in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Somalia, the authors detail how governance at the state and local levels explains the location of maritime piracy. Pirate Lands employs geospatial tools to rigorously measure how local political capacity and infrastructure affect maritime piracy. The authors find that pirates operate in areas where local governance is weak enough to incentivize collusion among pirates and local authorities yet strong enough to ensure that infrastructure and markets are sufficiently developed to permit the organization of sustained piracy. Interviews with former pirates, community members, and maritime security experts based on field research in Indonesia and Nigeria complement the quantitative findings. Pirate Lands offers the first comprehensive, social scientific account of maritime piracy.

This chapter models and empirically tests the cross-national correlates of contemporary commerce raiding. The chapter theoretically examines how state capacity at the center influences the rate of pirate attacks in the territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones of states. But it also recognizes that several other conditions help drive ship attacks, including privation, target opportunity, armed conflict, and the labor supply. The empirical models control for these factors when assessing cross-national and over-time variation in maritime piracy. Using multiple measures of state capacity, the chapter shows that pirates gravitate toward states that are weak at the center. It also finds that countries with larger populations, longer coastlines, proximity to maritime choke points, and poor economic conditions witness more pirate attacks. The last section discusses how to move from national capacity in the analyses presented in this chapter to subnational capacity in the next two chapters.

This chapter uses quantitative and qualitative methods to assess whether and how local measures of institutional capacity affect piracy in Indonesia. It disaggregates the unit of analysis to subnational grid-cell units and consistently observes a curvilinear relationship between local governance and organized piracy: there appears to be a capacity “sweet spot” that attracts criminal-type organizations that engage in sophisticated maritime attacks. It also finds that opportunistic piracy is affected by local measures of institutional quality but that this relationship is weaker and does not follow the same inverted-U-shaped pattern. The chapter complements the quantitative findings with interviews conducted in Indonesia’s Riau Islands. Interviews with former pirates, local community members, journalists, and other local experts confirm that infrastructure, markets, and collusion opportunities are important considerations for piracy.

This chapter first describes geographic and temporal trends in the frequency of attacks in Nigeria and Somalia. It then reviews the development of piracy in both countries, paying particular attention to local governance capacity. Similarly to the analyses of Indonesia in Chapter 6, this chapter notes a clear curvilinear association between nighttime light emissions and sophisticated pirate attacks against steaming ships on the open water. The findings are stronger in Nigeria than in Somalia, but this is to be expected given low variance in local capacity across the Somali state. Significantly, the empirical evidence presented on Nigeria and Somalia supports the findings from Chapter 6. Pirates locate in spaces characterized by intermediate state capacity, places with some infrastructural development and elites who can be bribed to look the other way. The evidence presented in this chapter shows considerably less piracy in areas with very weak or very strong governance.

Elections are held in nearly all countries in the contemporary world. Yet despite their aim of allowing for peaceful transfers of power, elections held outside of consolidated democracies are often accompanied by substantial violence. This special issue introduction article establishes electoral violence as a subtype of political violence with distinct analytical and empirical dynamics. We highlight how electoral violence is distinct from other types of organized violence, but also how it is qualitatively different from nonviolent electoral manipulation. The article then surveys what we have learned about the causes and consequences of electoral violence, identifies important research gaps in the literature, and proceeds to discuss the articles included in the special issue. The contributions advance research in four domains: the micro-level targeting and consequences of electoral violence, the institutional foundations of electoral violence, the conditions leading to high-stakes elections, and electoral violence in the context of other forms of organized violence. The individual articles are methodologically and geographically diverse, encompassing ethnography, survey vignette and list experiments and survey data, quantitative analyses of subnational and crossnational event data, and spanning Africa, Latin America, and Asia.