Political Parties and The State in Civil Wars

Separatist conflicts pose enduring and acute challenges to state consolidation. Can democratically-elected legislators from nationally-dominant parties reduce violence in such conflicts? Existing theory remains unclear. Legislators from national parties might lack credibility among separatist insurgent sympathizers, limiting their ability to mitigate insurgent violence in their constituencies. Their symbolic affiliation with ``outsiders'' could also incite more violence. Alternatively, representatives from parties with a pan-national presence may benefit from superior influence over the security bureaucracy, rendering them more effective against insurgents than legislators from other parties. We test these competing explanations using a regression discontinuity design and granular conflict data from a decades-long separatist insurgency in Punjab, India. The findings suggest that legislators from the nationally-dominant party durably reduced insurgent violence within their constituencies. Mechanism analyses indicate that these reductions occurred through relatively stronger influence over security forces and in constituencies with above-average access to information and communication technology enabling selective counterinsurgency operations.