Political assassination attempts are a form of political violence that target individuals who hold or are contesting for positions of prominence. While there has been research on the motivations behind political assassinations and the details of the attacks, the steps that political parties follow after they lose their leader or after their leader has been attacked, are under researched. Using instances of failed and successful assassinations of heads of political parties from across South Asia this paper seeks to illustrate the strategies that political parties assume after such attacks. Specifically, the article uses two characteristics of political parties; their succession patterns with regards to whether they are dynastic or non-dynastic, and their structure which refers to whether they are programmatic or personalized, to predict the reactions they will have to the assassination. The three reactions that are measured gauge whether the response will be aggressive or non-aggressive, united, or divided, and public facing or institutionally focused. I first offer a quantitative overview of the reactions gathered from 40 cases of political assassinations in South Asia. I then study four of these cases in-depth. Specifically, I study Rajiv Gandhi's Indian National Congress, Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Abdul Gani Lone's Jammu and Kashmir People's Conference, and Harchand Singh Longowal's Akali Dal party. I find that in most cases (34 of the 40) political parties display united reactions after assassinations. However, there is only a slightly higher preference for public facing reactions (23 of 40) as opposed to institutionally focused ones. Finally, half of the cases (20 of 40) indicate that political parties choose an aggressive reaction to the assassination as opposed to a non-aggressive one.
Sania Shahid (Tue,) studied this question.