How to prevent political violence
Rachel Kleinfeld and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca analyze America's recent rise in political violence, and how the winner-take-all system contributes to it.
[Editor’s note: DemocracySOS welcomes authors Rachel Kleinfeld and Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, who offer this excerpt from their longer article published in the October 2024 issue of the Journal of Democracy. The Journal is a quarterly academic journal that monitors and analyzes democratic regimes and pro-democracy movements around the world, publishing a blend of scholarly analysis, reports from democracy activists, updates on news and elections, and reviews of important books. Kleinfeld is senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, while Bibbins Sedaca is interim president of Freedom House and the Kelly and David Pfeil Fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.]
How can we reduce political violence? The United States has been asking itself this question since a would-be assassin’s bullet narrowly missed former president Donald Trump at a July 2024 rally, insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, and threats against election officials and other public servants exploded around the 2020 presidential election. The United States is not alone. Political violence has also been rising in other democracies, including France and Germany, both of which saw spikes in violence against local candidates during the recent EU parliamentary elections. What can countries that are currently grappling with political violence learn from the experiences of others that have had to address this problem?
The increasing violence and dangerous rhetoric that the United States and a handful of other wealthy, developed democracies are experiencing stems foremost from a political problem—one with three dimensions: The first is intense political polarization—voters feel that they are in an existential struggle in which their freedom and democracy itself depend on defeating opposing parties. Some voters become so polarized that they are willing to compromise democracy for partisan gain and even to excuse violence perpetrated by their party’s supporters.
The second is the exacerbation and exploitation of existing polarization by some political leaders to build voter loyalty and increase support. Parties may also flirt with rhetorical or even deeper support for violent groups to intensify us-versus-them sentiments and thereby energize their voting base, intimidate opposing candidates and voters, and pressure election administrators—all to increase the chance of victory.
The third and final dimension is the intense disillusionment of some citizens with how [America’s winner-take-all] political system is working and with all the major-party options. Such disenchantment can lead citizens to justify violence in hopes of bringing about something—anything—different. […]
Winner-take-all elections and political violence
[…]Winner-take-all systems—in which a single party’s candidate wins power over the entire district, sometimes even while falling short of a majority—are particularly associated with political violence because moving just a few voters can lead to a party’s total inclusion or exclusion from power. Two-party systems—which tend to result from winner-take-all rules—are also correlated with greater political violence, possibly because of their polarizing tendency. These systemic disadvantages are compounded by the large and growing share of single-member districts in the United States that are “safe” (that is, essentially noncompetitive) for one party or the other—a situation that allows the more-partisan voters who vote in low-turnout primary elections to effectively choose the winner, which leads to more-extreme politicians campaigning in more-extreme ways.
Add to all this a Congress so narrowly divided that the ballots of a small number of voters in a handful of states and districts can determine which party controls both houses of the legislature. In short, the United States has political structures that incentivize a zero-sum approach to political competition and a bias toward representation from the extremes, each of which increases the likelihood of violence.
While the United States, Germany, and France all have histories of political violence and have seen political violence rise again in recent years, each element of the American system supercharges these dynamics. Conversely, both France’s multiparty, two-round voting system and Germany’s mixed-member proportional-representation system dampen such dynamics by giving voice to all parties and beliefs across the political spectrum while still allowing for the coalition politics necessary to form a cordon sanitaire against an extremist party or simply to reduce the violent intensity of a duopoly. In Germany, closed party lists that determine more than half the seats in the Bundestag also allow political parties to reduce the potential for extremist individuals to gain seats, since party leaders play a gatekeeping role for those seats. The United States, unique in its binding party-primary elections, has no similar gatekeeping mechanism.
Electoral systems — and political leadership — matter
These structural realities explain why the 1998 Good Friday Agreement established a proportional-representation system for Northern Ireland: The winner-take-all system that existed during the violent Troubles was viewed as having exacerbated the polarization between the republican and loyalist communities. Structures are not cure-alls, however. There are plenty of drawbacks to multiparty systems, and the United States is unlikely to move away from a two-party system any time soon. [However,] reforms that reduce the outsized power of primary voters, changes that (re)empower political parties to serve as gatekeepers for democracy, ranked-choice voting with instant runoffs that require majorities to win and spur more civil campaigns, and moves toward more proportional forms of representation could reduce the extremism of politicians while enhancing voter representation.
[…] When politicians inflame polarization and violence in the hopes of building their base and political systems fail to contain the fallout, communities can do more than simply bear the costs. In Kenya, politicians had been using tribal animosities to build their bases since the return of multiparty democracy in the 1990s. The effects of this strategy had been particularly devastating in Wajir County, a rural area in the northeast that borders Ethiopia and Somalia. The county was home to many immigrants who were largely forgotten by the central government, other than when it sent in the military to quell local feuds and cross-border violence, or when politicians ginned up tribal animosity.
But local activists eventually said “enough” during the early 1990s, and women organized community groups of local notables to stop the spirals of violence sparked by political rhetoric. Businesses, women’s groups, faith leaders, and other local leaders would meet regularly, building trust among one another and solving problems. It was essential that all these leaders— no matter their tribe or how violent it was or was not—denounce violence from their own group. Only by doing so could they quell reprisals and delegitimize justifications for violence among those demanding revenge. […]
America’s political-violence problem is rooted in several mutually reinforcing political problems—deepening polarization, winner-take-all politics, parties’ failure to root out extremist elements, and waning public faith in democratic institutions. […] The more that leaders at all levels—from presidents and party leaders, to police chiefs and judges, to activists and community leaders—commit to upholding democratic values, to rejecting violence and antidemocratic, lawless behavior, and to using the tools that democracy provides to reform institutions and inspire hope and attachment to the system, the faster the trend can be reversed. […]
Rachel Kleinfeld @RachelKleinfeld Nicole Bibbins Sedaca @NicBibSed