Political and electoral violence in the 2020 municipal elections

Abstract

The article analyzes political violence during the 2020 municipal election cycle. The article pursues two objectives. The first theoretically discusses electoral violence as a specific kind of political violence, while the second aims to measure the incidence of five types of violence (homicides, attacks, threats, assaults and kidnappings) against local political leaders, based on daily press monitoring. In total, 485 cases were identified between January 2019 and December 2020. The victims are mostly male, white, highly educated, from small municipalities and affiliated to center-right parties. However, the log-linear model estimated under the Bayesian paradigm reveals that the chance of a homicide occurring is greater against non-white, low-educated politicians.

Keywords:
elections; political violence; electoral violence; local politics; municipal elections