The Effect of Democratic Political Institutions on Political Violence in Different Societal Settings
نویسنده
چکیده
We test three central claims in the consociationalist literature: that in ethnically divided societies, conflict can be reduced by adopting (1) proportional representation over majoritarian electoral rules, (2) parliamentary over presidential or semipresidential arrangements, and (3) a federal over a unitary system. Previous research on these questions has suffered from two major flaws: a poorly-designed measure of “divided society,” and model specifications that do not take into account the conditional nature of institutional effects. Correcting these flaws produces estimates that undercut much of the previous empirical support for consociationalist arrangements in divided societies. In particular, the combination of PR, parliamentarism, and federalism appears to be a uniquely bad choice when ethnic fragmentation and regional concentration are high and income crosscuttingness is low. 1 Department of Political Science, University of Michigan. Email: [email protected] and [email protected]. Selway and Templeman 2
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