American Political Science Review (2018) 112, 1, 49–67 doi:10.1017/S0003055417000491 c  American Political Science Association 2017 Secular Party Rule and Religious Violence in Pakistan GARETH NELLIS University of California, Berkeley NILOUFER SIDDIQUI University at Albany-State University of New York D oes secular party incumbency affect religious violence? Existing theory is ambiguous. On the one hand, religiously motivated militants might target areas that vote secularists into office. On the other hand, secular party politicians, reliant on the support of violence-hit communities, may face powerful electoral incentives to quell attacks. Candidates bent on preventing bloodshed might also sort into such parties. To adjudicate these claims, we combine constituency-level election returns with event data on Islamist and sectarian violence in Pakistan (1988–2011). For identification, we compare districts where secular parties narrowly won or lost elections. We find that secularist rule causes a sizable reduction in local religious conflict. Additional analyses suggest that the result stems from electoral pressures to cater to core party supporters and not from politician selection. The effect is concentrated in regions with denser police presence, highlighting the importance of state capacity for suppressing religious disorder. L arge swaths of the Islamic world are en- gulfed in religious violence. Within Muslim- majority countries, killings perpetrated by ter- rorist groups numbered at least 25,000 in 2015. 1 In Nigeria, an ongoing rebellion by Boko Haram has re- sulted in the displacement of 2.2 million people (Co- molli 2015). Taliban fighters continue to frustrate ISAF efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan (Lyall, Blair, and Imai 2013), while tensions between Sunni and Shia sects fuel violent insurgencies in Iraq and Yemen (Ahmed 2011). Alongside deepening conflict, many countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and southern Asia are charting a course toward greater democracy. 2 This has kindled anxiety on the part of international policymak- ers regarding the possible nexus between electoral out- comes and ethnoreligious violence. Many have argued that the best way to mitigate interreligious group con- flict in weakly institutionalized democracies is to abet the election of “moderates” and “secularists.” In a 2013 speech before the United Nations General Assembly, for example, President Barack Obama lamented the turmoil in the Middle East that had “laid bare deep Gareth Nellis is the Evidence in Governance and Politics Post- doctoral fellow, Institute of Governmental Studies, Moses Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA (gareth.nellis@berkeley.edu). Niloufer Siddiqui is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany, State Univer- sity of New York, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12222, USA (nasiddiqui@albany.edu). Our thanks to Rafael Ahlskog, Ahsan Butt, Chris Clary, Asad Liaqat, Steven Rosenzweig, Fredrik S¨ avje, Mike Weaver, Steven Wilkinson, anonymous reviewers, and participants at the 2017 An- nual Convention of the International Studies Association, and the 2017 Midwest Political Science Association conference for helpful comments and advice. Received: October 24, 2016; revised: September 27, 2017; accepted: September 29, 2017. First published online: November 27, 2017. 1 This figure represents the summed 2015 terrorism-related death counts for Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria—the five Muslim-majority states worst-hit by Islamist militancy—as enumer- ated by the Institute for Economics and Peace (2015). 2 The average Polity IV score of Muslim-majority states jumped by 30 percentage points between 1980 and 2014 [see Supplementary Appendix (SA), Fig. A1]. divisions within societies.” In response, he noted that “America and others have worked to bolster the mod- erate opposition.” 3 The European Union has sought to shore up secular parties in the Maghreb through its European Neighborhood Policy (La¨ ıdi 2008). The presumption that having moderate forces prevail at the ballot box can help contain the spread of religious strife suffuses policy discussion. But do secularists in fact curb religious violence when in office? Not only is available evidence scant, but social scientific theory yields ambiguous predic- tions. On one hand, secular parties—those promoting avowedly nonreligious platforms and subscribing to an inclusive national vision—might face powerful elec- toral incentives to quell attacks, especially when they rely on the votes of violence-hit minorities (Horowitz 1985; Wilkinson 2004). It is also possible that more competent politicians, and those nursing a deep-seated commitment to preventing bloody disturbances, gravi- tate toward secular parties. However, electoral victory by secularists might exacerbate conflict if religiously motivated militants target violence on the strongholds of secular opponents (cf. Crost, Felter, and Johnston 2014). Meanwhile, capacity-based accounts imply that secularist incumbency will be largely irrelevant in places where state institutions are enfeebled or absent, or where civilian control over the military is tenuous (Fearon and Laitin 2003). In this article, we spell out the channels by which secular-party incumbency might shape religious con- flict. We then seek to adjudicate these claims empir- ically, employing Pakistan—the world’s sixth largest country by population—as a laboratory. Since the late 1980s, Pakistan has operated mostly under democratic institutions. Over the same time period, the country has been convulsed by two types of religious violence: sec- tarian hostilities between the country’s minority Shia and majority Sunni communities, and Islamist/Jihadist militancy that mushroomed in the wake of the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan. Terrorism claimed the lives of 35,000 Pakistanis between 2001 and 2011 3 See goo.gl/0jWths, accessed March 7, 2016. 49 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . UCSD University of California San Diego, on 14 May 2020 at 16:19:26, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055417000491