One distinguishing feature of mainstream social science is its growing regard for model building and formal hypothesis testing. In South Asian studies this is most evident in accounts of ethnic riots or communal violence. This paper examines a model of votes and violence proposed by Steven Wilkinson. We first examine how well the model performs against a data set that we have assembled on the twenty worst incidents of communal violence in India since 1950. The Wilkinson model is consistent with some important key facts in our data set, most notably in terms of levels of urbanization and “percentage Muslims” in riot-affected towns and cities. However, proximity to national or state elections is not found to be a strong driver of prolonged ethnic rioting. Nor is it the case that India’s worst instances of communal violence occurred mainly where there was direct electoral competition between less than 3.5 effective political parties, the other main predictive variable in the Wilkinson model. We then discuss the limitations more broadly of attempts to explain and even predict ethnic violence within the framework of a quantitative model. We pay attention to time inconsistencies, principal-agent problems, religiosity and the homogenization of riot events, and omitted variables (notably, memory work and ideological fervour). We conclude with some general remarks on the search for order in social science.
追求秩序：理解印度分裂後的印度教徒與穆斯林之間的暴力事件
主流社會科學的一個突出特點是其對模式建立和假設測試的日益重視。這在南亞研究中的對種族騷亂和群體間暴力的研究上尤為顯著。本文攷察了Steven Wilkinson提出的選舉與暴力的模式。本文首先用我們就1950年以來在印度發生的二十個最惡性的群體暴力事件所收集的一組數據攷察了該模式的相關性。 Wilkinso的模式與我們數據中的一些主要的事實想脗合，尤其是在受騷亂影響的市鎮和大城市的城市化程度和穆斯林人口比例方面。但我們發現全國和省級選舉與這些暴力事件的相關性並不強，並不是長期種族騷亂的一個重要的因素。我們還發現印度最惡性的群體暴力事件的主要發生地並非是在少於3.5％有效率的政黨之間有直接選舉競爭的地區，而這是該模式中另一個主要的預示性變量。我們接下來探論了試圖用量化模型解釋及預言種族暴力的侷限性。我們著重討論了時間不一致性、委託代理問題、宗教虔誠及對騷亂事件的均質化，以及那些被忽視的變量（如記憶的作用和意識形態的狂熱）。我們最後就社會科學研究中對秩序的追求提出了總體意見。
Translated from English by Xin Huang
Stuart E. Corbridge