Defying normative expectations, incentives inherent to democratic politics can allow violence to persist within contested and participatory regimes. Extending the criminal governance rationale, we investigate how democratic politics and institutions shape violence by organized criminal groups (OCGs). We outline eight hypotheses linking electoral competition, participation, mayoral alternation, budgetary allocation, local council size, and mayoral re-election to variations in criminal violence. Leveraging novel municipal-level data from Mexico (2010–2020) and two-way fixed-effects negative binomial models, we argue that democratic features of local governments influence criminal violence by disturbing the symbiotic ties between State officials and OCGs: the politics of democracy condition OCG-violence by disrupting the ‘gray zone’ of criminality. Our results and contribution highlight that beyond policing and militarization, the design of local institutions can impact citizens’ security inside democracies. These findings also urge future research to recognize that under criminal (forms of) governance, OCG violence can indeed be political violence.