Riot Rewards? Religious Conflict and Electoral Outcomes

Abstract

Do incidents of ethno-religious polarization influence voter behavior, and hence benefit nationalist right-wing parties? We address this question through the case study of India, the world’s largest functional democracy. Specifically, we examine whether prior events of Hindu-Muslim riots electorally benefit the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), a prominent Hindu nationalist party. The paper contributes to the literature by proposing a novel instrument to demonstrate a causal relationship between Hindu-Muslim riots and BJP’s electoral performance. Exploiting the association between temperature and conflict, i.e. moderately high temperature increases conflict by provoking aggressive behavior while very high temperature dampens it by curtailing mobility, we use temperature variation as an instrument for Hindu-Muslim riots. Results show that riots significantly increase BJP’s voteshare in subsequent elections. We explain this causal association through the ethnic voting framework i.e. riot events consolidate the Hindu vote in favour of BJP and improve its electoral performance.