Elections, political parties, and civil war1
Simon Hug2
Département de science
politique, Université de Genève
Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW),
International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO)
Paper prepared for presentation at the
CSCW Workshop on ``Political Parties and Civil Peace,"
PRIO, Oslo August 23-24, 2010
highly preliminary memo, Aug 15, 2010
Abstract
Elections form a cornerstone of any democracy, and the former can
hardly work without political parties. But how do elections and the way
in which party competition is organized affect conflict recurrence in
post-conflict situations? Combining detailed information on groups
involved in ethnic civil war and election data I find that especially if
the second competitive election falls into a post-conflict period, the
likelihood of conflict recurrence is high. The (few) cases suggest that
both the sore-loser argument and mobilization strategies by politicians
are related to this breakup of civil peace.
Footnotes:
1This paper
draws on Cederman, Gleditsch and Hug (2009). Financial support by the
Swiss National Science Foundation through the NCCR ``Democracy in the
21st century'' and Grant No. 105511-116795, as well as the research
assistance by Sophie Buchs is gratefully acknowledged. Nils-Christian
Bormann provided helpful comments on an earlier draft. Thanks are also
due to Matt Golder, Susan Hyde and Nikolaj Marinov for making available
and helping me use their data on elections.
2 Département de
science politique, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales;
Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4;
Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@unige.ch
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