The Myth of Consociationalism? Conflict Reduction in Divided Societies

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (12) ◽  
pp. 1542-1571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Selway ◽  
Kharis Templeman
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Institutional Effects ◽  
Data Limitations ◽  
Conflict Reduction ◽  
Cross Country

Although advocates of consociationalism have asserted that there is solid empirical evidence supporting the use of power-sharing institutions in divided societies, previous quantitative tests of these theories suffer from serious data limitations and fail to take into account the conditional nature of institutional effects. The authors test the effect of (a) proportional representation (PR) over majoritarian electoral rules, (b) parliamentary over presidential or semipresidential arrangements, and (c) a federal over a unitary system in reducing conflict in a cross-country data set of 101 countries representing 106 regimes. The results undercut much of the previous empirical support for consociationalist arrangements in divided societies. Using a multiplicative specification, the authors find that PR and parliamentarism appear to exacerbate political violence when ethnic fractionalization is high, though the effect of federalism is less certain.

Consociationalism, Power Sharing, and Politics at the Center

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Sustainable Peace ◽  
Complex Power

For more than four decades, advocates of consociationalism and their opponents have been engaged in a debate over about how to design institutions to achieve sustainable peace in divided societies. In general, existing theories acknowledge the importance and usefulness of institutional design in conflict resolution, but offer rather different prescriptions as to the most appropriate models to achieve stable conflict settlements. Three such theories are of particular significance: power sharing in the form of its liberal consociational variant, centripetalism, and power dividing. Consociationalism, centripetalism, and power dividing offer a range of distinct prescriptions on how to ensure that differences of identity do not translate into violence. They often go beyond “politics at the center” and also provide arguments on territorial dimensions of ethnic conflict settlement. Practitioners of conflict resolution recognize the need to combine a range of different mechanisms, giving rise to an emerging practice of conflict settlement known as “complex power sharing.” None of the three theories of conflict resolution fully captures this current practice of complex power sharing, even as liberal consociationalism appears to be the most open to incorporation of elements of centripetalism and power dividing. A theory of complex power sharing would need to explain why there is empirical support for a greater mix of institutions than existing theories recommend.

In plain sight? Reconsidering the linkage between brideprice and violent conflict

2019 ◽  
pp. 073889421986325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott J Cook ◽  
Cameron G Thies
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Marriage Markets ◽  
Marriage Rates ◽  
Data Limitations ◽  
Over Time

Persistent brideprice inflation has been linked to greater political violence. However, empirically testing this argument is complicated by the paucity of data on brideprice. We argue that despite the lack of over-time brideprice data, one can proxy for variation in marriage markets using changes to population, economic growth, and marriage rates themselves, thereby offering a clearer test of the brideprice–violence relationship. Our analysis suggests that there is little empirical support for such a relationship, and concludes that the previous support was largely due to data limitations and omitted confounds.

Immiserizing Growth

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Household Survey ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poverty Measures ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
Country Analysis ◽  
Cross Country

Immiserizing Growth occurs when growth fails to benefit, or harms, those at the bottom. It is not a new concept, appearing such figures as Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. It is also not empirically insignificant, occurring in between 10% and 35% of cases, depending on the data set and the growth and poverty measures used. In spite of this, it has not received its due attention in the academic literature, dominated by the prevailing narrative that ‘growth is good for the poor’. The chapters in this volume aim to arrive at a better understanding of when, why and how growth fails the poor. They combine discussion of mechanisms of Immiserizing Growth with empirical data on trends in growth, poverty and related welfare indicators. In terms of mechanisms, politics and political economy are chosen as useful entry points to explain IG episodes. The disciplinary focus is diverse, drawing on economics, political economy, applied social anthropology, and development studies. A number of methodological approaches are represented including statistical analysis of household survey and cross-country data, detailed ethnographic work and case study analysis drawing on secondary data. Geographical coverage is wide including Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the People’s Republic of China, Singapore, and South Korea, in addition to cross-country analysis. As the first book-length treatment of Immiserizing Growth in the literature, we believe that this volume constitutes an important step in redirecting attention to this issue.

scholarly journals Terrorist campaigns and the growth of the Muslim population: a reply

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Clara Egger ◽  
Raul Magni-Berton
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Terror Attacks ◽  
Terrorist Groups ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract A recently published paper in this journal (Choi, 2021) establishes a statistical link between, on the one hand, Islamist terrorist campaigns – including terrorist attacks and online propaganda – and, on the other the growth of the Muslim population. The author explains this result by stating that successful campaigns lead some individuals to convert to Islam. In this commentary, we intend to reply to this article by focusing on the impact of terrorist attacks on religious conversion. We first show that Choi's results suffer from theoretical flaws – a failure to comprehensively unpack the link between violence and conversion – and methodological shortcomings – a focus on all terrorist groups over a period where Islamist attacks were rare. This leads us to replicate Choi's analysis by distinguishing Islamist and non-Islamist terror attacks on a more adequate timeframe. By doing so, we no longer find empirical support for the relationship between terror attacks and the growth of the Muslim population. However, our analyses suggest that such a hypothesis may hold but only in contexts where the level and intensity of political violence are high.

scholarly journals Do Voters Respond to Cross-Ethnic Campaigning inDivided Societies?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Ochieng' Opalo ◽  
Leonardo R. Arriola ◽  
Donghyun Danny Choi ◽  
Matthew Gichohi
Keyword(s):  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Presidential Candidate ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Ethnic Mobilization ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Intergroup Competition ◽  
Before And After

In order to comply with electoral rules incentivizing cross-ethnic mobilization, candidates in divided societies often campaign in opponents’ strongholds among non-coethnics. In this paper, we show that such cross-ethnic campaign rallies may actually depress outgroup candidates’ support among non-coethnics. We argue that candidates’ holding of campaign rallies in non-coethnic constituencies can inadvertently trigger perceptions of intergroup competition, increase the salience of ethnicity, and depress support for non-coethnic candidates. We leverage a natural experiment that exploits the timing of an unscheduled campaign rally held by a presidential candidate in a non-coethnic county in his opponent’s stronghold during Kenya’s 2017 election. In comparing survey respondents before and after the rally, we find that the candidate’s post-rally favorability significantly decreased among non-coethnic voters, while the proportion of voters identifying in ethnic terms simultaneously increased. These findings have important implications for the efficacy of institutional design to promote cross-ethnic political mobilization in polarized societies.

scholarly journals Do Attentional Lapses Account for the Worst Performance Rule?

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Christoph Löffler ◽  
Gidon T. Frischkorn ◽  
Jan Rummel ◽  
Dirk Hagemann ◽  
Anna-Lena Schubert
Keyword(s):  
Time Distribution ◽  
Hierarchical Modeling ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Response Time Distribution ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Task Completion ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Attentional Lapses

The worst performance rule (WPR) describes the phenomenon that individuals’ slowest responses in a task are often more predictive of their intelligence than their fastest or average responses. To explain this phenomenon, it was previously suggested that occasional lapses of attention during task completion might be associated with particularly slow reaction times. Because less intelligent individuals should experience lapses of attention more frequently, reaction time distribution should be more heavily skewed for them than for more intelligent people. Consequently, the correlation between intelligence and reaction times should increase from the lowest to the highest quantile of the response time distribution. This attentional lapses account has some intuitive appeal, but has not yet been tested empirically. Using a hierarchical modeling approach, we investigated whether the WPR pattern would disappear when including different behavioral, self-report, and neural measurements of attentional lapses as predictors. In a sample of N = 85, we found that attentional lapses accounted for the WPR, but effect sizes of single covariates were mostly small to very small. We replicated these results in a reanalysis of a much larger previously published data set. Our findings render empirical support to the attentional lapses account of the WPR.

scholarly journals Building Bridges in Divided Societies: Sustaining Democratic Transition Through Complex Power-Sharing in Lebanon and Iraq

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-32
Author(s):  
Petros Petrikkos
Keyword(s):  
Hybrid Model ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Complex Power ◽  
Fragile Environment

This paper looks at how divided societies like Lebanon and Iraq currently incorporate very fragile models of governance. The recommendations in this study attempt to introduce a hybrid model that considers integration and consociationalism as effective tools to electoral management in both countries, in light of the recent elections taking place in May 2018, and the continuities presented to this day. In assessing the effectiveness of consociationalism as a power-sharing framework, this paper does not attempt to depart from the already-established model of governance. Rather, the analysis presents elements that would hopefully improve power-sharing and governance in the two divided societies of Lebanon and Iraq. Elements as such may bring forth a steadier process that aids democratic transition in divided societies. Sectarianism is heavily embedded in both the Lebanese and Iraqi communities. Ignoring the conflicting issues that rise with each successive election only promotes a fragile environment that deeply divides, instead of uniting societies.

The Legal Context of Turnout

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan E. Leighley ◽  
Jonathan Nagler
Keyword(s):  
Voter Turnout ◽  
State Level ◽  
Electoral Rules ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Election Administration ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Electoral Impact ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Cost Of Voting

This chapter considers the electoral impact the new, wider array of voter registration and election administration laws using a new data set collected on state electoral rules between 1972 and 2008. States vary tremendously as to how easy it is to register and to vote, and previous research suggests that these laws affect who votes because they change the cost of voting. However, most of these studies rely on cross-sectional data, and usually consider the influence of one reform at a time. The chapter provides aggregate (state-level) analyses of the effects of changes in these rules on voter turnout. These analyses help us address the question of whether overall voter turnout has increased as a result of these legal changes. It finds modest effects of election day registration, of absentee voting, and of moving the closing date for registration closer to the election on overall turnout. The effect of early voting is less clear.

Smart economic development patterns in Europe: interaction with competitiveness

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurgita Bruneckienė ◽  
Jonas Rapsikevičius ◽  
Mantas Lukauskas ◽  
Ineta Zykienė ◽  
Robertas Jucevičius
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Low Carbon Economy ◽  
Global Competitiveness ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
The 2008 Financial Crisis

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the smart economic development (SED) patterns in Europe in relation to competitiveness. Motivational focus corresponds to global events: the fourth industrial revolution, transition to a low-carbon economy, economic shocks (such as the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit or the coronavirus pandemic), which requires rethinking development policies, targeting competitiveness increase and reducing imbalances in economic development. Design/methodology/approach The analysis includes self-organising neural networks cluster analysis and correlations, comparative analysis of SED indicators structure and cumulative index estimation with World Economic Forum (WEF) global competitiveness index. The panel data set of 19 years from 2000 to 2018 for 30 European countries. Findings Overall, cross-country examination suggests that European countries of higher competitiveness illustrate higher estimates in SED. The key determinants are juridical fairness, social responsibility, competence building, intelligence and welfare employment to develop smart patterns for reaching higher competitiveness. Research limitations/implications The limitations relate to the particular sample of European countries and gathering statistical data and a methodology of the SED index calculation. In addition, the paper contains a macroeconomic environment focus on competitiveness estimation. Further research may be improved with micro and mezzo environment incorporation at a cross-country analysis level. Practical implications By linking well-known terms of competitiveness and economic development with a concept of smartness, new approaches to policymaking emerged. The methodology presented in this paper has implications for territorial cohesion policies, competitiveness and branching strategies. The combination of SED sub-indexes and WEF GCI might aid a more accurate ex ante measurement. Social implications The findings are essential for fostering a smart approach in economic development for long-term competitiveness. Originality/value This paper provides original empirical evidence about the relationship between SED and competitiveness and adds new knowledge that smartness becomes a way for building countries’ competitiveness by identified two profiles of SED patterns by development stages, namely, integrated to economic development and institutional-based which is divided to focus and balanced.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document