Electoral Cycles and Caste Violence in India

In presence of ethnic voting, violence is often used in India to dissuade ethnic minorities from voting. In this paper, we examine if violence against disadvantaged castes follows a pattern during an electoral cycle. More specifically, we want to see if crimes against the Scheduled Caste population in India is affected by it’s proximity to state assembly elections. For this we construct a district level panel of 466 districts, spread across 18 states from2007 to 2021 on crime and elections in India. Our baseline specification exploits a fixed effects model and finds that election years are marked by a statistically significant fall in caste violence, which is quite high in the year preceding the election. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect is significantly enhanced in districts with a history of caste politics, especially where caste parties have more political power. Our findings also support the claim that an increase in political power leads to a greater degree of confrontation and conflict rather than its prevention.