Democracy dismissed: When leaders and citizens choose election violence

Kathleen Klaus and Megan Turnbull
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Kathleen Klaus: Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Sweden
Megan Turnbull: Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, USA

Journal of Peace Research, 2025, vol. 62, issue 5, 1447-1462

Abstract: In democratic settings, election violence is often jointly produced: it relies not only on elite incentives and capacities to deploy violence, but also on the willingness of ordinary actors to participate. Yet many studies of election violence overlook this elite–citizen interaction, effectively black-boxing the process through which elites mobilize people to fight. This article introduces and advances the concept of the joint production of election violence – a relatively common but undertheorized process through which political elites rely, not on their own militias or state security forces, but on the collaboration and participation of ordinary citizens. Such violence is especially puzzling in democracies, where citizens ostensibly have nonviolent avenues for political claim-making. To help explain how such violence becomes possible and how it unfolds, the article develops a framework that emphasizes two central components: (1) the circulation and resonance of threat-based and victimhood narratives that legitimize political violence, and (2) the social infrastructure – networks and organizational linkages – that facilitate the organization and coordination of violence. We draw on two cases of jointly produced election violence – Nigeria in 2003 and the United States in 2021 – to demonstrate how the framework can be applied across democracies at distinct stages of consolidation. Broadly, by developing the concept of jointly produced violence and offering a framework for its study, we aim to facilitate more systematic and comparative analyses of elite–citizen interactions in the context of electoral violence, helping to render visible a process that is often invisible in existing studies, while also bridging theories of election violence, democratic erosion, and right-wing extremism.

Keywords: Democratic erosion; election violence; jointly produced violence; narratives; political mobilization; social infrastructure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:joupea:v:62:y:2025:i:5:p:1447-1462

DOI: 10.1177/00223433251352662

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