Elections in development countries are frequently violent and that affects the democratization and development process and deserving candidates are afraid of participating in the elections. This current study wants to contribute to the electoral violence scholarship by exploring how policy change, candidate selection, and patrimonial (patronage) system cause the violence in the local government election in Bangladesh. This research project seeks to examine and explore the relationships between these three factors of electoral violence, and wants to fill a critical gap in the scholarship on ‘electoral violence’, which has previously almost exclusively paid attention to the electoral process, electoral engineering, conditions of elections under authoritarian rule, or violent political conflict.

Funded by: Special Research Fund (BOF), Ghent University

Staff involved: Krishna Kumar Saha (PhD candidate); Bert Suykens (supervisor)