The One-Dimensionality of the Institutional Incentives Approach to Ethnic Violence

Presidentialism and the Risk of Ethnic Violence: A Reply to Reilly, Sisk, Basedau and McGarry

“…Many contextual factors, such as political agency (see Sisk) or a country's 'ethnic landscape' (see Basedau and McGarry), are very difficult to quantify. Although I agree entirely with Matthias Basedau's emphasis on institutional combinations (see also Theuerkauf, 2010), measures of 'ethnic landscapes', i.e. commonly used ethnic fractionalization or polarization indices, are (in their current format) rather limited in scope and hence might lead to unreliable results (see also Laitin & Posner, 2001).…”

Territorial self-governance and proportional representation: reducing the risk of territory-centred intrastate violence

“…Through this lens of institutional combinations, our level of analysis moves beyond the likely effects of individual institutions, so that we are not merely concerned with whether state structures with territorial self-governance outperform those without (Bermeo, 2002), PR electoral systems outperform non-PR ones (Cohen, 1997) or parliamentary forms of government outperform non-parliamentary ones (Theuerkauf, 2013) in their violent conflict-reducing effects. While there are arguments, summarized in previous sections, which highlight the benefits of political institutions that disperse rather than concentrate power for the purpose of conflict management, we want to move beyond one-dimensional comparisons of different forms of government, state structures and electoral systems with one another (Theuerkauf, 2010b).…”

“…If they do, this has relevant implications for how academics and policy-makers approach institutional design questions, as it becomes crucial to test whether the constitutive elements of different institutional arrangements reinforce or weaken each other's conflict management potential. This implies moving to a level of investigation which does not treat political institutions in isolation (Theuerkauf, 2010b), but explicitly analyses their interplay.…”