Abstract What are the violent repertoires of politics in democracies? We contend that political violence in democratic settings can take many forms. We offer new guidelines and conceptual insights to enhance our understanding of political violence in democracies and promote a more comprehensive study of it. We provide new empirical evidence on patterns of political violence in a polarized democracy, relative trends, repertoires of violence, and the state’s responses. Our novel dataset on political violence covers the period of Italian history between 1969 and 1988, also known as the Years of Lead (Anni di Piombo). The dataset is based on a triangulation of news sources and an ‘actor-action-target’ analytical framework. We collected over 7,800 geolocated and temporally coded events, shedding light on an understudied but extremely violent period in Italian history. We contend that scholars should avoid conceptualizing political violence in democratic societies as a residual phenomenon, often narrowly framed as mere terrorism due to normative biases and analytical constraints. Instead, a broader perspective is necessary to fully understand its complexity and implications.

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.

What is the effect of political violence on electoral support for anti-system parties? We argue that the effect of violence is asymmetric and predominantly benefits nationalist, radical-right parties. Posing as defenders of the nation, nationalist parties benefit from violence by their political opponents and violence targeted against perceived threats to the nation. Two potential mechanisms underlie this asymmetric effect. First, nationalist violence becomes an acceptable means of defense in the eyes of status quo-oriented voters if they attribute blame to out-groups who used violence first. Second, nationalist violence itself increases the salience of a threat to the nation, and voters concerned with preserving the status quo see radical right parties as its most effective defender. To test this argument, we collect novel actor-based and geospatial data of political violence in interwar Italy. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we model the effect of violence on vote shares of anti-system parties at the municipality level in the 1919 and 1921 elections. Our results indicate increasing electoral support for the nationalist Fascist party in municipalities that experienced violence committed by either the far right or left after the 1919 election. In contrast, the radical left Socialist party loses electoral support if violence occurs. These results are robust to different specifications, modeling choices, and measurement approaches. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for violence in liberal democracies today.

International NGOs and cross-national scholarship have drawn attention to a type of political violence particularly prevalent in democracies of the Global South: the assassination of social activists. We argue that the decentralized yet systematic nature of this targeted, lethal violence requires a theoretical framework and empirical approach addressing subnational dynamics. Specifically, we suggest that a significant share of these assassinations stems from the presence of highly territorialized illicit activities, particularly those based on dispossession. These criminal economies are sustained by networks of local elites and criminal actors – criminal-political networks – that develop forms of extra-legal governance and redefine land ownership and resource use, provoking resistance from local communities. When confronted by activist-led challenges, these criminal-political networks respond with lethal violence. We assess this theory through an empirical study of the Brazilian Amazon. Our statistical analysis indicates that the frequency of assassinations is significantly associated with industrial deforestation, a highly territorialized illicit practice involving dispossession. A qualitative case study of the municipality of Altamira further confirms that lethal violence against social activists can be attributed to criminal-political networks responding to local resistance against industrial deforestation, rather than to less territorialized drug trafficking. By bridging debates on criminal governance and socio-environmental conflict, the article contributes theoretically to the growing research on repressive violence against civil society actors in democratic regimes. Empirically, the study demonstrates how the micropolitics of this violence necessitate a focus on subnational variation, akin to micro-level approaches in civil war studies.

Abstract Democracies have turned to the militarization of public security as a primary strategy to combat organized crime. Mounting evidence demonstrates that this policy results in the escalation of violence and human rights violations. However, militarization continues to enjoy broad public support. Widespread citizen support poses a challenge to democracy as it can result in the election and empowerment of political leaders favoring militarization, enabling further human rights abuses. We propose and test an information-based theory of change in policy support. We evaluate the effects of increasing the salience of information on state armed actors’ frequent collusion with criminal organizations vis-à-vis the human consequences of militarized operations, in addition to the systematic nature of state armed actors’ unlawful behavior as reported by human rights organizations. We test our hypotheses in Mexico using an original two-wave online panel survey with a conjoint experiment embedded in the second wave. The findings show that making collusion salient reduces support for militarization, independent of the state armed actor in charge. Exposure to information about lethal violence against innocents also results in overall lower policy support, but not information on the systematic nature of abuses. Further analyses suggest that this null finding results from high tolerance for unlawful state armed actors’ behavior, as long as it is perceived to serve the purpose of fighting criminals. However, unlawful behavior that reinforces organized crime, such as collusion, effectively reduces militarization support.

Abstract How do experiences of violence in war shape ordinary people’s commitment to democratic principles? Wars often lead to a temporary suspension of democratic rights, yet extant research suggests that wartime violence can both strengthen and undermine support for democracy. We argue that these effects vary across different dimensions of democracy. Drawing on public opinion surveys fielded in Ukraine in October 2022 and July 2024, amidst the ongoing war with Russia, we examine how experiences of wartime violence affect people’s commitment to protecting three core liberal democracy principles: minority rights, freedom of speech, and free and fair elections. Our most consistent finding is that individuals who have been physically injured or lost a close family member or friend are less likely to be supportive of safeguarding the protection of minority rights. We find weaker, though still suggestive, evidence that such experiences are also related to attitudes toward freedom of speech. By contrast, experiences of wartime violence do not systematically influence views on safeguarding free and fair elections. These results speak to democratic resilience in Ukraine but underscore the importance of assessing individual democratic principles – rather than democracy in the abstract – as experiences of violence may impact different dimensions of democracy differently.

How do domestic terrorist attacks in a recipient country influence the inflow of US overseas defense spending (ODS)? While extant literature on domestic terrorism has paid great attention to its consequences in areas such as economic development, elections, and authoritarian survival, few studies have studied how domestic terrorism influences cooperation between countries. At the same time, the increasing power competition between major powers has renewed scholars’ interest in state overseas defense spending as a strategic tool for power projection. In this article, I propose a theory that connects domestic terrorist attacks with the inflow of US overseas defense spending. With more domestic terrorist attacks, the incumbents are under more pressure from other political elites and the public. Support from major powers such as the US can help leaders’ political survival. For the US, while this presents an opportunity to preserve or even expand its influence on foreign countries and protect its overseas interests, there are risks and uncertainties associated with supporting countries with deteriorating security environments. Compared to other types of support, such as state visits and military aid, overseas defense spending is a more flexible tool the US can adopt to gain policy concession while mitigating risks and uncertainties. However, this effect of domestic terrorist attacks might be conditioned by the regime type of recipient countries. Using new data on US ODS, I find support for this argument.

Since 2016, governments in 77 countries have implemented 1,118 internet shutdowns, revealing a growing trend in the use of ‘digital repression’. Governments often justify these shutdowns as necessary for public safety and applied impartially in response to security threats. Focusing on India, the country that has enacted the most shutdowns globally, this article explores whether shutdowns instead follow a logic of targeting political opponents, and how they compare with traditional forms of physical repression. The results align with a theory of strategic political targeting as shutdowns are predominantly executed in areas with lower ruling party support, following opposition violence, and prior to escalations in military violence. This pattern differs significantly from that of physical repression, revealing that internet shutdowns are a unique and politically motivated tool used by those in power to suppress opposition and facilitate state-sanctioned violence.

This article presents an update on the Strategies of Resistance Data Project. It extends the original coding of organizations seeking greater self-determination, including demands made by organizations, use of violent and nonviolent tactics and accommodations made to movements with a temporal range of 1960–2020. We elaborate on the update procedures, highlight trends in the data, and provide an application of the data to a number of hypotheses about organizational survival. The article explores tactics and organizational survival in a diverse set of contexts using data on both violent and nonviolent tactics. We find that employing a diversity of large-scale nonviolent tactics is associated with greater organizational survival, while accommodation by the state decreases the chance of survival.

How do nonviolent alternatives affect international support for violent rebel groups? Armed rebellions are often sustained by outside sympathy and support, which conditions global coordination to end intrastate conflict. Studies on reducing such support largely neglect how the emergence of alternative, nonviolent resistance groups impacts international support for violent resistance. Nonviolent alternatives could plausibly increase support for armed rebellion by legitimizing the cause of resistance or reduce support by delegitimizing the means of violent rebellion relative to nonviolent alternatives. To examine this puzzle, we conducted two online survey experiments across more than 30 countries using a pre-post design to capture changes in attitudes toward a hypothetical violent rebel group before and after the emergence of an alternative resistance group. We randomly vary both the presence and features of the alternative group, including explicitly nonviolent rhetoric, government repression and concessions, and short descriptors meant to signal the alternative group’s capacity to fill psychological needs for agency, justice, and belonging. We find that alternative resistance options consistently reduce support for armed rebellion, including among those originally most supportive of it, and that respondents strongly prefer explicitly nonviolent alternatives, yet neither the material efficacy nor the emotional resonance of those alternatives have a substantial additional effect.