Modelling the Legacies of War Violence: Voters, Parties, Communities

Abstract

wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. that is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. this article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. we devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in southeast europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme.

Choosing Women in Postwar Elections: Exposure to War Violence, Ideology, and Voters’ Gender Bias

“…This variable has been used in several other studies (e.g., Glaurdić and Vuković 2015, 2016), where it was shown to correspond rather well to the movement of the front lines between the combatants. To assuage any concerns about possible bias of this measure, however, we also conduct robustness tests using the figures for Croatian military deaths acquired from the Croatian Memorial and Documentation Center of Homeland War (Glaurdić, Lesschaeve, and Mochtak 2018). In our robustness tests, we use the cube-transformed figures for military deaths and war disability to examine whether the skew in the distribution had any effect on the results.…”

Condoning postwar corruption: how legacies of war prevent democratic accountability in contemporary Southeast Europe

“…When it comes to possible war victimhood stemming from war experiences, however, things get a bit more complex. The literature lacks a standard way of operationalising this concept (Glaurdić, Lesschaeve, and Mochtak 2019). Therefore, for reasons of parsimony, we measure respondents' personal exposure to war violence as a sum scale of six binary indicators.…”

War and Nationalism: How WW1 Battle Deaths Fueled Civilians’ Support for the Nazi Party

“…However, findings also indicate that this may be the result of short-term priming effects rather than persistent changes in political attitudes (ibid.). War-induced ingroup–outgroup dynamics and preferences for nationalism, in contrast, can endure for years after violence has ended (Bauer et al 2016; Glaurdić, Lesschaeve, and Mochtak 2018). Thus, focusing on a postwar context, we expect a positive association between war losses and nationalism.…”