The Maoist insurgency in Nepal presents an anomaly for students of civil war and democratic transitions.
How was the Maoist wing of the Nepal Communist Party able to mobilize peasants to support
their insurgency when they could not mobilize enough peasants to vote for them in elections? The authors
address these questions by exploring the ways in which the persistence of traditional clientelist networks
in the countryside enabled rural elites to mobilize peasants to vote for parties other than the Maoist party,
even though peasants would have benefited from that party’s advocacy for land reform. When that same
party used insurgent violence against rural elites, peasants were willing and able to support the insurgency
and abstain from voting in the 1999 election in locales where the insurgency succeeded in disrupting
clientelist ties. The authors test these arguments with district-level data on election turnout and
the distribution of households among several land-tenure categories. Findings support the argument that
turnout was greater where land-tenure patterns gave landed elite greater influence over peasant political
behavior. Where higher levels of insurgent violence disrupted patterns of clientelist dependency, turnout
declined. What electoral democracy could not deliver to peasants – land reform and relief from clientelist
dependency – the Maoist insurgency promised to bring through political violence.