![]() These findings speak to the importance of securing broad and not only large mass movements to promote democracy. ![]() Socially diverse movements are also more likely to end in the short- and long-run establishment of more democratic institutions, suggesting that heterogenous protest movements’ potential for bringing about democracy is more promising than expected. ![]() Analyzing new global data mapping the social group composition of anti-regime protest campaigns from 1900 to 2013, the article finds consistent evidence that socially diverse protest movements are more likely to overthrow authoritarian regimes, and this is not driven by protest size. But, diverse protest movements may also be more vulnerable to fragmentation and in-fighting, which may particularly threaten prospects of democracy in the aftermath of an authoritarian regime breakdown. Heterogenous protest coalitions are also more likely to socially overlap with regime supporters and the security forces, which should encourage regime splits and defections. Coalitions across social groups should impose higher costs on authoritarian regimes through access to a wide range of resources, strategies and sources of leverage. When are mass protest movements able to overthrow authoritarian regimes and promote democratic transitions? This article considers whether socially diverse protest movements are more conducive to democratization than movements restricted to one or a few social groups. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Second, low levels of competitiveness – typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence – increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. ![]() However, there is no dataset that codes whether acts of violence occurred between factions of the same party or had links to processes of candidate selection prior to the actual election campaign. 31 Some of the existing data sources on violence allow us to distinguish between different types of violence, such as riots, civilian killings, and battles (ACLED) or protests, riots, strikes, inter-communal conflict, government violence against civilians, and other forms of social conflict (SCAD). Various types of data on elections and violence have emerged, including datasets on acts of violence in general, such as ACLED 25 and the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset, 26 datasets recording acts of election-related violence, namely SCAD 27 and AEVD, 28 and datasets recording whether an election was violent, including NELDA, 29 V-Dem, 30 and PEI. A number of studies have explored the spread of electoral violence across countries and over time in Africa and globally 24 but none have looked systematically at intra-party violence. ![]()
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