Political Violence under the Domestic Democratic Peace: How Democratic Consolidation and Representation Curb Violent Challenges against the State

The role of representative democracy is underspecified in studies of political violence. Studies of terrorism and insurgency have promoted atomized explanations for the role of representation and democratic consolidation in either promoting or deterring each tactic. These explanations are contradictory and do not adequately consider the interrelated nature of tactics used by violent challengers to a state. I argue that challengers to a state are presented with an arsenal of possible tactics that include insurgency and terrorism and their use of either one or both is constrained by the strength of representative institutions and that these institutions also limit the scope and duration of ongoing campaigns of political violence. I design a statistical model to explicitly model the likelihood of transitioning both to and from different tactics of political violence in a given year by violent challengers to the state. I find that representative government limits groups to using terrorism, while political exclusion and a lack of political freedom lead to the use of insurgency. I also find that more features of representative government lead groups to transition from insurgency and to periods of non violence at higher rates.