The politicization of crime: electoral competition and the supply of maritime piracy in Indonesia

Abstract

Electoral competition in weak institutional settings has been shown to increase criminal violence, in particular homicides. Electoral competitiveness, by virtue of threatening the ability of incumbents to maintain informal corruption agreements with criminal networks, is argued to increase crime because of violent competition among criminal groups over future influence. We link elections to maritime piracy, a form of criminal behavior that has increased substantially since the end of the Cold War and for which cross-national, temporally and spatially disaggregated data are available. We argue that electoral competition reinforces piracy because political changes threaten to disrupt collusive agreements between pirates and government authorities. Anticipating a disruption of criminal activity, pirates elevate their attack rates before political changes undermine these agreements. This disruption effect suggests that jurisdictions holding competitive electoral contests should experience more maritime piracy. We test our hypothesis on electoral competitiveness and piracy with subnational data for the 1999 and 2004 elections in Indonesia. Our results show that piracy escalates in proximity to highly competitive electoral districts.