Violence against Political Actors: New Research Directions

Political scientists have long been troubled by political violence, defining it as the use of force – or threatened use of force – to achieve political ends. In some cases, violence around election times is a subset of activities in a larger political conflict, for example ethnic or communal violence, with the effect of not only disturbing voting outcomes but also further polarizing divisions in society. In other instances, violence is mobilized to commit electoral fraud through ballot rigging, vote buying, and disrupting voter registration, in turn undermining the integrity of elections (Höglund 2009). Political harassment operates in a similar way, involving verbal and physical challenges to create an atmosphere of fear in order to achieve political goals (Doan 2009). Violence and harassment are commonly employed in authoritarian regimes as a tool of repression. Their use in democratic states, however, challenges core values of the political system itself (Schwarzmantel 2010). Existing research primarily examines dynamics of violence and harassment in relation to citizens, voters, and activists. Most of this work is conducted at the aggregate level, focusing on countries rather than on individual experiences, with a strong bias towards reporting on physical acts of violence taking place in the public sphere (among others, see Collier 2009; Fischer 2002; Gillies 2011; Mueller 2011; Opitz, Fjelde, and Höglund 2013; Rapoport and Weinberg 2000). Recent advances in this field include impressive data collection efforts, like the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset (www.prio.org /Data/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/), Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (www.acleddata. com), and Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict Dataset (http://www.sexualviolencedata.org/). Yet political and election violence are often theoretically defined in broader terms, highlighting that threats and intimidation can also be highly efficient means to influence citizen participation in politics (Fischer 2002; Höglund 2009; Bjarnegård 2017). Such acts might include voter suppression through terrorist threats; property destruction, including defacing campaign materials, to intimidate candidates; or online abuse directed at elected officials to interfere with or suppress their political activity. Two more recent literatures expand this traditional focus in new directions. The first is a wave of research on violence and harassment against individual politicians. Forensic psychiatrists have published a series of studies on “threatening and inappropriate” or “aggressive/intrusive” behaviors towards public figures (Every-Palmer et al 2015; James et al 2016a; James et al 2016b; Narud and Dahl 2015; Pathé et al 2014). These entail physical attacks, threats, unwanted approach, alarming behaviors, stalking, loitering, property interference, spurious legal action, distribution of malicious materials, inappropriate letters or emails, inappropriate phone calls, and inappropriate social media contacts, among other possibilities. According to this literature, politicians do not appear to be targeted only for stands on controversial policy issues; rather, as a group they attract the attention of “fixated loners” suffering from mental illness. Political scientists and economists have taken a different angle on these questions, seeking to explain when, why, and how individuals and groups might employ violence against politicians. Evidence from Italy indicates that it is most likely to occur after elections, to influence policy, rather than before elections, to affect electoral outcomes. Violence is most often used against municipal level politicians, and most commonly takes the form of arson and threatening letters (Daniele and Dipoppa 2017; cf. Dal Bó and Di Tella 2003). Features of the broader context may facilitate political violence, as in Mexico where narco-assassinations have risen since 2005 due to growing criminal fragmentation and political pluralization. Targeted politicians thus typically fall into one of three categories: they accepted illicit money from a criminal organization and then became a target for one of its rivals, they refused to cooperate with criminal organizations, or they had a political opponent with narco-connections (Blume 2017). The rise of social media has also been identified as a key factor in an upsurge of abuse levelled at politicians on platforms like Twitter and Facebook (McLoughlin and Ward 2017; Owen, Noble, and Speed 2017). In a sign of growing concern about this phenomenon, in 2015 the Italian parliament commissioned a survey of Italian politicians killed since 1975, and in 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May called on the UK Committee on Standards in Public Life to carry out a review on abuse and intimidation of parliamentary candidates, while the Swedish government launched an action plan to tackle threats and hate directed at political officeholders, journalists, and artists. The second new area of research focuses on violence and harassment against marginalized groups in politics, with the perceived aim of depressing their political participation. Some of this work analyzes the experiences of African-Americans in the United States, finding that – in addition to a long history of voter suppression in the South (Combs 2016; Piven, Minnite, and Groarke 2009) – the election of growing numbers of black politicians in the post-Civil Rights era met with numerous forms of white resistance, including spurious corruption allegations and ethics investigations (Musgrove 2012). Most of this literature focuses, however, on the case of women. This work first emerged from the observations of practitioners, noting a troubling rise in reports of assault, intimidation, and abuse directed at female political actors. In 2011, the UN General Assembly called for zero tolerance for violence against female candidates and elected officials, and in 2012, Bolivia became the first country in the world to criminalize political violence and harassment against women, originating in a campaign by locally elected women to document the numerous injuries and abuses they confronted upon assuming political office. In 2016 and 2017, global action on this issue began to accelerate. The National Democratic Institute launched the #NotTheCost campaign to stop violence against politically active women, and the Inter-Parliamentary Union undertook the first study of sexism, violence, and harassment against women parliamentarians. While data on this phenomenon is still scarce, a 2011 report by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems found significant gender differences in experiences of electoral violence: while male victims typically experienced physical violence taking place in the public sphere, female voters most often reported intimidation and psychological abuse (Bardall, 2011). Data from the IPU confirms the importance of looking beyond physical abuse as an indicator of political violence: while 25% of female MPs had experienced some form of physical violence in the course of their work as parliamentarians, more than 80% had suffered psychological violence, more than 30% had been targets of economic violence, and more than 20% had experienced some form of sexual violence (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2016). Research by Amnesty International on Twitter abuse against women MPs in the UK finds that women across the political spectrum are targets of online violence and intimidation. Female MPs of color, however, receive 30% more abuse than their white counterparts (Dhrodia 2017). Together with IPU’s finding that young women in parliament are particularly targeted for harassment, these results indicate a need for both a gendered and an intersectional perspective on violence against politicians. Inspired by these developments, emerging academic research has drawn on the accounts of women across the world to theorize at least five types of violence against women in politics: physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic (Krook 2017; Krook and Restrepo Sanin 2016). Conceptual ambiguities remain, however, as to the exact contours of this phenomenon. Practitioner definitions suggest that violence against politically active women targets women because of their gender, often using a gendered toolkit, to discourage women as women from participating in politics (Krook 2017). This would suggest that women and other politically marginalized groups are more at risk of becoming victims of political violence. This suggestion finds support in recent research that show that demonstrate that women MPs are subjects to more negative treatment than male MPs even in a fairly gender-equal parliament such as the Swedish one (Erikson and Josefsson 2017). It also resonates strongly with political actors themselves: in a parliamentary debate on abuse and intimidation of candidates in the UK, numerous interventions – by male and female MPs – noted that women and ethnic minorities were often specifically targeted. However, these approaches largely bracket the question of whether women’s experiences might be similar or different to those of men, and provide insufficient guidance for how to distinguish violence against women in politics from violence perpetrated against politicians as a whole. Emerging research suggests that it might be useful to distinguish between violence against politicians as gendered in its motive, form, or impact (Bardall, Bjarnegård, and Piscopo 2017). This workshop proposes to develop and expand upon these new directions in research on violence against political actors. Social scientists tend to think about violence in two ways: as an act of force (a minimalist conception) and as an act of violation (a comprehensive definition) (Bufacchi 2005). The former encapsulates the most common understanding of violence, involving the intentional infliction of physical injury; it thus delineates very clear boundaries around what constitutes violence. Arguing that such a focus is too narrow, missing out on many other important dimensions, the latter focuses on the violation of rights, opening up a broader discussion of infringements and transgressions. To maximize participation, the workshop will opt for a broad definition of “violence,” meaning that it will include work focusing on dynamics that others might label abuse, intimidation, or harassment. The workshop seeks to engage a number of different research questions and welcomes papers on any or all of these topics. First, what ‘is’ violence against political actors? What forms can it take? Why does it occur? Second, how can violence against political actors be measured? What methods are most appropriate? How prevalent is it, according to different measurement approaches? Third, what are the broader effects of violence against political actors? What impact does violence have on the political process – and on society more generally? Papers do not need to focus on violence against members of politically marginalized groups, but such contributions would be particularly welcome. 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