To Vote or Not to Vote

Abstract

Organized crime-related violence has important electoral consequences. Analyses of aggregate panel data on Mexican elections and an original postelectoral survey conducted in Mexico show that the strategic use of violence by organized crime groups during electoral campaigns demobilizes voters at large. Regions where criminal organizations attempted to influence elections and politics by targeting government officials and party candidates exhibited significantly lower levels of electoral participation. Consistently, at the individual level, results reveal that voters living in regions where organized crime engaged in high-profile violence were more cautious when deciding whether to vote or not. Prior research has focused on the role of crime victimization in nonelectoral participation, but the empirical evidence presented here suggests that the impact of a criminal context on turnout transcends personal victimization experiences.

Living in Gang-Controlled Neighborhoods: Impacts on Electoral and Nonelectoral Participation in El Salvador

“…Her findings show that criminal violence in general lowers voter turnout in Mexican municipalities, but especially when drug cartels target politicians during electoral campaigns, creating a threatening environment during elections. In addition, Ley's (2018) empirical results suggest that criminal-electoral violence discourages voter turnout among both crime victims and nonvictims. In general, crime victimization does not appear to have a strong effect on voter turnout.…”

“…Similarly, in the context of Mexico, quantitative studies find that higher levels of criminal violence at the local level result in lower voter turnout rates (Ley 2018;Trelles and Carreras 2012). Trelles and Carreras (2012) theorize that, in municipalities with high homicide rates, fear of crime discourages citizens from leaving their homes and attending the polls.…”

“…Moreover, the authors posit that, in these contexts, citizens are less likely to trust political institutions and consequently have little confidence in electoral processes. Ley (2018) contributes to this literature by demonstrating the importance of considering the nature of criminal violence in exploring its impacts on political behavior. Her findings show that criminal violence in general lowers voter turnout in Mexican municipalities, but especially when drug cartels target politicians during electoral campaigns, creating a threatening environment during elections.…”

Conceptualizing and measuring subnational democracy across Indian states

“…Whereas President's Rule can be conceptualized as "a vertical threat" to democracy, anti-system violence can be understood as a "horizontal threat". 90 The existence of similar threats in Mexico highlights the need to theorize challenges to subnational democracy from actors outside the political system more explicitly, 91 especially since such threats are often localized and do not affect all of the national territory.…”

La insatisfacción con la democracia en México (2014-2017)

“…Esta variable se aproxima a una dimensión clave de las deficiencias del régimen mexicano, a raíz de la ola de violencia criminal que se desató como resultado de la estrategia de combate al narcotráfico promovida por el gobierno de Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) -la cual no fue ni siquiera mitigada por la administración de Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018)-. Una de las consecuencias de este fenómeno ha sido la vulneración de las libertades de expresión, asociación y participación política, al igual que otros derechos y garantías indispensables para la democracia, en particular en el plano local (Ley, 2017;Ponce, 2016;Schedler, 2014). 8 Para observar la experiencia ciudadana acerca del estado que guardan las libertades ciudadanas en el país, se incluyó un índice de déficit de libertades siguiendo el procedimiento utilizado por Zechmeister (2017), a partir de un grupo de reactivos contenidos en la encuesta de 2017 (lib1-lib4).…”