Riot Rewards? Religious Conflict and Electoral Outcomes

Do incidents of ethno-religious conflict influence voter behavior, and hence benefit nationalist right-wing parties? We address this question through the case study of India, the world’s largest functional democracy. Specifically, we examine whether prior events of Hindu-Muslim riots electorally benefit the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), a prominent Hindu nationalist party. The paper contributes to the literature by proposing an identification strategy to demonstrate a causal relationship between Hindu-Muslim riots and BJP's electoral performance. Exploiting the association between temperature and conflict, i.e. high temperature increases conflict by provoking aggressive behavior, we use temperature variation as an instrument for Hindu-Muslim riots. Results show that riots significantly increase BJP's voteshare in subsequent elections. We explain this causal association through religious polarization mechanism i.e. riot events consolidate the Hindu vote in BJP's favour and improve its electoral performance.