Democracy dismissed: When leaders and citizens choose election violence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it