Discipline, development, and duress: the art of winning an election in Bangladesh

Journal article

Abstract:: Bangladesh’s ruling Awami League Party has now won three consecutive general elections, an unprecedented achievement in the country’s political history. The 2014 and 2018 elections were, however, mired in controversy. Current analyses of the most recent of these center on the institutional and coercive tactics used by the Awami League to limit the political opposition. International media outlets have focused on allegations of vote rigging and intimidation. This article develops a deeper analysis of the Awami League victory, focusing on two city constituencies, both of which are traditional strongholds of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Based on research before and after the 2018 election, it shows that managing party discipline enabled a coherence in the election not achievable by the opposition. The Awami League has, furthermore, successfully built a narrative around development achievements in the country and its vision for the future, both of which have had genuine traction with the public. The 2018 election revealed three pillars of the Awami League’s success: discipline, development, and duress.

Files:: Maitrot_and_Jackman_2023_Discipline_development_and.pdf

(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)

Copyright holder:: Maîtrot and Jackman
Rights statement:: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author (s) or with their consent.

If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record