Political Institutions and Conflict
Director: Prof. Dr. Ursula Daxecker
Research Program
Conflict is a central aspect of politics. Conflict can be managed so that any disputes are resolved peacefully, but it can also break out into the open and turn violent. Institutional devices play an important role in influencing how much and what kind of conflict we observe. It is well known, for instance, that democratic institutions constrain governments’ capacity to use force at home and abroad. Likewise, a rich body of work has shown that economic institutions such as the protection of property rights lower incentives for rent-seeking, thereby reducing the risk of political violence. The global expansion of democracy and coinciding adoption of liberal economic institutions thus help explain why severe episodes of violent conflict have declined in the last 100 years.
Despite these gains, progress towards democracy and peace remains uneven. While almost all countries have adopted the formal institutions of democracy, it has failed to develop as expected in many places. Instead, we have witnessed the emergence of pseudo-democratic regimes in which patronage and rent-seeking remain widespread, and where politicians and parties campaign with intimidation and vote buying rather than programmatic politics. Moreover, democratic institutions have come under pressure even in affluent democracies that many considered to be consolidated. In the United States, for instance, longstanding democratic norms and institutional safeguards have been diminished, while political violence, including against politicians and the electoral process, is on the rise. The promise of democracy to provide us with peaceful methods for processing conflict is thus increasingly in question. These challenges inspire us to ask: What is the relationship between institutions and conflict?
The department’s central aim is to understand why and how institutional arrangements shape the risk and nature of different types of conflict, and how conflict itself affects the functioning and makeup of institutions. Questions of continuity and change in political institutions and conflict are central to political science and adjacent disciplines, and the department is committed to engage them through theoretically informed empirical work. In line with this commitment, it proposes an ambitious research program that explores the persistence of weakly institutionalized democracies as well as conflict, but also investigates change, such as why and how democratic institutions have been threatened in recent decades. The department situates itself within a rationalist-positivist approach to social science, while also drawing on constructivist and interpretivist accounts for heuristic fertility. Our empirical focus is on the Global South, contexts that represent approximately 75% of the world population, but continue to remain understudied due to lack of high-quality systematic data and the inadequacy of conventional approaches for studying sensitive questions and groups. Understanding why and how political institutions work in the Global South thus requires new theory, data, and methods, which in turn can generate novel insights for other regions.
We explore the central thesis of conflict and institutions several vantage points. At the micro level, our work on legacies of violence shows how people engage with institutions in the aftermath of conflict. At the meso-level, we account for political elites, non-political power brokers, and the organizational structures within democratic competition to show that these play a crucial role in shaping individual-institutional relations. At the macro level, our research examines how institutional dynamics are shaped by context, with particular attention to the distinctive trajectories of democracy in the Global South, while also undertaking comparative studies across contexts to shed light on continuities and discontinuities created by individual institutional contexts. Our goal is to contribute to this body of knowledge not only through publications but also by making original, high-quality observational data on electoral processes, violent and non-violent conflict, and other outcomes publicly available. These are resource and time intensive endeavours, but much needed to improve our understanding of democratic politics. We also work with novel data sources to answer new questions, such as using multimodal data to study the effects of hostile rhetoric. Finally, methodological innovation is central to the department. Our core interests involve sensitive themes and populations, thus requiring a diverse methodological toolkit combining advanced quantitative methods with state-of-the-art qualitative techniques. For instance, research in the department may combine causal inference designs, original surveys, newspaper data, and in-depth interviews to establish causal relationships, test mechanisms, and triangulate insights across these methods.
The department explores these questions across four distinct but related research themes. Our goal is to produce novel insights for important challenges in contemporary society, including the rise of extreme strategies and violence, the persistence of semi-democratic institutions, and democratic erosion.