Laia Balcells
Biographic Data
| ID | 2632662 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laia Balcells |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laia |
| FAMILY NAME | Balcells |
| SIGNATURE | BALCELLS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Institute for Economic Analysis-CSIC, Barcelona, Spain |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The Troubles and Beyond: The impact of a museum exhibit on a post‐conflict society
In divided societies, can museums contribute to healing and recovery? While efforts to memorialize past violence typically aim to promote tolerance and reconciliation, remembering could exacerbate divisions in recovering societies where the past is deeply contested. We examine a transitional justice museum exhibit in Northern Ireland. We combine evidence from nearly 1,400 participants across focus groups, a field experiment at the Troubles and Be…
The Wars of Others: The Effect of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Spanish Nationalism
Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, third-party states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Sp…
Social costs and policy preferences: Evidence from territorial strategies in Catalonia
Research on territorial preferences in self‐determination disputes has traditionally focused on economic and identity‐related factors. However, the impact of social costs—encompassing overall societal comfort and conviviality—on specific preferences for territorial strategies remains understudied. This paper presents a novel perspective by investigating how social costs affect such policy preferences in Catalonia, a region in Spain where secessio…
Territorial disputes and affective polarization
Can territorial disputes within countries be a basis for affective polarization? If so, how does it vary across territories? A burgeoning literature on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions; we argue that contentious political issues such as those relating to territorial integrity can also be a basis for such affective polarization, where citizens feel concord with those sharing such policy preferences and animus for th…
Violent victors: Why bloodstained parties win postwar elections
Journal Article Violent victors: why bloodstained parties win postwar elections Get access Violent victors: why bloodstained parties win postwar elections. By Sarah Zukerman Daly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2022. 352pp. £100.00. Isbn978 0 69123 132 7. Available as e-book. Laia Balcells Laia Balcells Georgetown University,USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 99, …
The "Weight" of Territorial Issues: Evidence from Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland
Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present ev…
Do Transitional Justice Museums Persuade Visitors? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Do transitional justice museums persuade visitors? We implement a novel field experiment at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile to understand the effects of governments' attempts to shape citizens' attitudes through symbolic transitional justice policies such as museums and memorials. Our findings suggest that though perceptions of the museum vary along ideological lines, Chilean university students display greater support fo…
Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide
Early research on wartime violence against civilians highlighted a distinction between macro- and micro-level approaches. Macro-level approaches, grounded in the international relations subfield, focus on variation across countries or conflicts, while micro-level approaches, more influenced by the comparative politics subfield, focus on variation within countries or conflicts. However, some of the recent research on civilian targeting does not fi…
Violence, Resistance, and Rescue during the Holocaust
What do different forms of anti-Semitic violence during World War II teach us about the comparative study of political violence? In this article, we review three recent political science books about the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, the responses of their Jewish victims, and the rescue efforts that helped European Jews evade violence. These books demonstrate promising theoretical, empirical, and methodological uses for the rich historica…
Using a natural experiment to estimate the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks
This study investigates the consequences of terrorist attacks for political behavior by leveraging a natural experiment in Spain. We study eight attacks against civilians, members of the military, and police officers perpetrated between 1989 and 1997 by Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a Basque terrorist organization that was active between 1958 and 2011. We use nationally and regionally representative surveys that were being fielded when the attacks…
Dynamics of internal resettlement during civil war: Evidence from Catalonia (1936-39)
This article explores the dynamics of internal resettlement in times of civil war by using a novel dataset of all municipalities of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which includes information on the total number of internally displaced from other parts of Spain that sought refuge in Catalan localities during the civil war. The dataset, which also incorporates information on relevant covariates, is built with a combination of prim…
New findings from conflict archives: An introduction and methodological framework
As they pursue information and deploy violence during conflict, combatants compose, catalog, and preserve a wide variety of records, such as memos, investigative reports, and communiqués. In an increasing number of post-conflict scenarios, these records are being archived and released publicly, quickly becoming a critical new source of data for studies of peace and conflict. The objective of this special issue is to advance a new research agenda …
Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence during Civil War
What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? This innovative book connects pre-war politics to patterns of violence during civil war. It argues that both local political rivalry and local revenge account for violence against civilians. Armed groups perpetrate direct violence jointly with local civilians, who collabora…
Warfare, political identities, and displacement in Spain and Colombia
The determinants of low-intensity intergroup violence: The case of Northern Ireland
What accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? This article explores the determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. Low-intensity violence comprises a variety of events from riots to attacks against other civilians as well as against homes and symbolic buildings such as churches. We argue that this violence is more likely and prevalent in interface areas where…
Preferences for Inter-Regional Redistribution
What explains individual support for inter-regional redistribution? Few studies examine support for regional redistribution, even though such issues are politically salient in many democracies. We test models that hypothesize that such preferences are affected by regional and individual income, as well as other arguments beyond the traditional political economy framework. We focus on informational assumptions and implications of these models with…
Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars
Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do “technologies of rebellion” impact a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civil…
Bridging Micro and Macro Approaches on Civil Wars and Political Violence: Issues, Challenges, and the Way Forward
This article reflects on the importance of linking micro and macro levels of analysis in order to advance our current understanding of civil wars and political violence processes and discusses the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We first identify the main problems in research on political violence that is focused on a single level of analysis and describe the challenges faced by research that attempts to establish connections…
Party Polarisation and Spatial Voting in Spain
In this article, we examine which political issues are considered most important by the Spanish electorate. Although a variety of potentially relevant issues are available, voters are forced to summarise them in just one vote. Thus, they need to prioritise some issues over others. This article analyses which issues end up being the most important for the Spanish electorate when they decide their vote, and why some issues become more influential t…
The Consequences of Victimization on Political Identities: Evidence from Spain
This article explores the impact of war-related traumatic experiences on political identities and political behavior by exploring different pieces of empirical evidence from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and its aftermath. On one hand, the author analyzes semistructured interviews of survivors of the civil war and the dictatorship; on the other hand, she assesses data from a specialized survey implemented on …
Continuation of Politics by Two Means: Direct and Indirect Violence in Civil War
This article distinguishes between ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘indirect’’ violence during civil wars. These two types differ in their forms of production: while indirect violence is unilaterally perpetrated by an armed group, direct violence is jointly produced by an armed group and civilians, and it hinges on local collaboration. These differences have consequences for the spatial variation of each of these types: in conventional civil wars, indirect viole…
Determinants of Attitudes Toward Transitional Justice: An Empirical Analysis of the Spanish Case
Much has been said about the institutional determinants of transitional justice (TJ), yet scholars still know little about the determinants of citizens’ attitudes toward restorative policies aimed at addressing human rights violations of the past. This article draws on an original survey of a representative sample of Spanish citizens conducted in 2008. One year earlier, the Spanish socialist government had approved the so-called Law of Historical…
Death is in the Air: Bombings in Catalonia, 1936-1939
EN]: This article analyzes variation in bombings during conventionally fought civil wars. It establishes a number of hypotheses based on a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of political factors in accounting for violence. In addition, it takes into account emotional factors such as citizens' revenge aspirations. The hypotheses are tested with data on bombings perpetrated by the Francoist side in 1,062 municipalities of Catalonia duri…
Rivalry and Revenge: Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars1
Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors (such as territorial control or the characteristics of armed groups) over political ones (such as ideological polarization or prewar political competition). Having distinguished between irregular and conventional civil wars and between direct and indirect violence, I theorize on the determinants of direct violence in conventional civil wars. I introduce a…
International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict
Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought-their "technology of rebellion." After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking …
International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict
Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought-their "technology of rebellion." After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking …
The Consequences of Victimization on Political Identities: Evidence from Spain
This article explores the impact of war-related traumatic experiences on political identities and political behavior by exploring different pieces of empirical evidence from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and its aftermath. On one hand, the author analyzes semistructured interviews of survivors of the civil war and the dictatorship; on the other hand, she assesses data from a specialized survey implemented on …
Rivalry and Revenge: Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars1
Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors (such as territorial control or the characteristics of armed groups) over political ones (such as ideological polarization or prewar political competition). Having distinguished between irregular and conventional civil wars and between direct and indirect violence, I theorize on the determinants of direct violence in conventional civil wars. I introduce a…
Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars
Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do “technologies of rebellion” impact a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civil…
Continuation of Politics by Two Means: Direct and Indirect Violence in Civil War
This article distinguishes between ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘indirect’’ violence during civil wars. These two types differ in their forms of production: while indirect violence is unilaterally perpetrated by an armed group, direct violence is jointly produced by an armed group and civilians, and it hinges on local collaboration. These differences have consequences for the spatial variation of each of these types: in conventional civil wars, indirect viole…
Bridging Micro and Macro Approaches on Civil Wars and Political Violence: Issues, Challenges, and the Way Forward
This article reflects on the importance of linking micro and macro levels of analysis in order to advance our current understanding of civil wars and political violence processes and discusses the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We first identify the main problems in research on political violence that is focused on a single level of analysis and describe the challenges faced by research that attempts to establish connections…
Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide
Early research on wartime violence against civilians highlighted a distinction between macro- and micro-level approaches. Macro-level approaches, grounded in the international relations subfield, focus on variation across countries or conflicts, while micro-level approaches, more influenced by the comparative politics subfield, focus on variation within countries or conflicts. However, some of the recent research on civilian targeting does not fi…
Warfare, political identities, and displacement in Spain and Colombia
Determinants of Attitudes Toward Transitional Justice: An Empirical Analysis of the Spanish Case
Much has been said about the institutional determinants of transitional justice (TJ), yet scholars still know little about the determinants of citizens’ attitudes toward restorative policies aimed at addressing human rights violations of the past. This article draws on an original survey of a representative sample of Spanish citizens conducted in 2008. One year earlier, the Spanish socialist government had approved the so-called Law of Historical…
Preferences for Inter-Regional Redistribution
What explains individual support for inter-regional redistribution? Few studies examine support for regional redistribution, even though such issues are politically salient in many democracies. We test models that hypothesize that such preferences are affected by regional and individual income, as well as other arguments beyond the traditional political economy framework. We focus on informational assumptions and implications of these models with…
New findings from conflict archives: An introduction and methodological framework
As they pursue information and deploy violence during conflict, combatants compose, catalog, and preserve a wide variety of records, such as memos, investigative reports, and communiqués. In an increasing number of post-conflict scenarios, these records are being archived and released publicly, quickly becoming a critical new source of data for studies of peace and conflict. The objective of this special issue is to advance a new research agenda …
Do Transitional Justice Museums Persuade Visitors? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Do transitional justice museums persuade visitors? We implement a novel field experiment at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile to understand the effects of governments' attempts to shape citizens' attitudes through symbolic transitional justice policies such as museums and memorials. Our findings suggest that though perceptions of the museum vary along ideological lines, Chilean university students display greater support fo…
The determinants of low-intensity intergroup violence: The case of Northern Ireland
What accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? This article explores the determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. Low-intensity violence comprises a variety of events from riots to attacks against other civilians as well as against homes and symbolic buildings such as churches. We argue that this violence is more likely and prevalent in interface areas where…
Dynamics of internal resettlement during civil war: Evidence from Catalonia (1936-39)
This article explores the dynamics of internal resettlement in times of civil war by using a novel dataset of all municipalities of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which includes information on the total number of internally displaced from other parts of Spain that sought refuge in Catalan localities during the civil war. The dataset, which also incorporates information on relevant covariates, is built with a combination of prim…
Party Polarisation and Spatial Voting in Spain
In this article, we examine which political issues are considered most important by the Spanish electorate. Although a variety of potentially relevant issues are available, voters are forced to summarise them in just one vote. Thus, they need to prioritise some issues over others. This article analyses which issues end up being the most important for the Spanish electorate when they decide their vote, and why some issues become more influential t…
Territorial disputes and affective polarization
Can territorial disputes within countries be a basis for affective polarization? If so, how does it vary across territories? A burgeoning literature on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions; we argue that contentious political issues such as those relating to territorial integrity can also be a basis for such affective polarization, where citizens feel concord with those sharing such policy preferences and animus for th…
The "Weight" of Territorial Issues: Evidence from Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland
Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present ev…
The Wars of Others: The Effect of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Spanish Nationalism
Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, third-party states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Sp…
Violent victors: Why bloodstained parties win postwar elections
Journal Article Violent victors: why bloodstained parties win postwar elections Get access Violent victors: why bloodstained parties win postwar elections. By Sarah Zukerman Daly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2022. 352pp. £100.00. Isbn978 0 69123 132 7. Available as e-book. Laia Balcells Laia Balcells Georgetown University,USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 99, …
Violence, Resistance, and Rescue during the Holocaust
What do different forms of anti-Semitic violence during World War II teach us about the comparative study of political violence? In this article, we review three recent political science books about the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, the responses of their Jewish victims, and the rescue efforts that helped European Jews evade violence. These books demonstrate promising theoretical, empirical, and methodological uses for the rich historica…
Death is in the Air: Bombings in Catalonia, 1936-1939
EN]: This article analyzes variation in bombings during conventionally fought civil wars. It establishes a number of hypotheses based on a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of political factors in accounting for violence. In addition, it takes into account emotional factors such as citizens' revenge aspirations. The hypotheses are tested with data on bombings perpetrated by the Francoist side in 1,062 municipalities of Catalonia duri…
Social costs and policy preferences: Evidence from territorial strategies in Catalonia
Research on territorial preferences in self‐determination disputes has traditionally focused on economic and identity‐related factors. However, the impact of social costs—encompassing overall societal comfort and conviviality—on specific preferences for territorial strategies remains understudied. This paper presents a novel perspective by investigating how social costs affect such policy preferences in Catalonia, a region in Spain where secessio…
The Troubles and Beyond: The impact of a museum exhibit on a post‐conflict society
In divided societies, can museums contribute to healing and recovery? While efforts to memorialize past violence typically aim to promote tolerance and reconciliation, remembering could exacerbate divisions in recovering societies where the past is deeply contested. We examine a transitional justice museum exhibit in Northern Ireland. We combine evidence from nearly 1,400 participants across focus groups, a field experiment at the Troubles and Be…
Rivalry and Revenge: Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars1
Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors (such as territorial control or the characteristics of armed groups) over political ones (such as ideological polarization or prewar political competition). Having distinguished between irregular and conventional civil wars and between direct and indirect violence, I theorize on the determinants of direct violence in conventional civil wars. I introduce a…
International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict
Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought-their "technology of rebellion." After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking …
Continuation of Politics by Two Means: Direct and Indirect Violence in Civil War
This article distinguishes between ‘‘direct’’ and ‘‘indirect’’ violence during civil wars. These two types differ in their forms of production: while indirect violence is unilaterally perpetrated by an armed group, direct violence is jointly produced by an armed group and civilians, and it hinges on local collaboration. These differences have consequences for the spatial variation of each of these types: in conventional civil wars, indirect viole…
Determinants of Attitudes Toward Transitional Justice: An Empirical Analysis of the Spanish Case
Much has been said about the institutional determinants of transitional justice (TJ), yet scholars still know little about the determinants of citizens’ attitudes toward restorative policies aimed at addressing human rights violations of the past. This article draws on an original survey of a representative sample of Spanish citizens conducted in 2008. One year earlier, the Spanish socialist government had approved the so-called Law of Historical…
Death is in the Air: Bombings in Catalonia, 1936-1939
EN]: This article analyzes variation in bombings during conventionally fought civil wars. It establishes a number of hypotheses based on a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role of political factors in accounting for violence. In addition, it takes into account emotional factors such as citizens' revenge aspirations. The hypotheses are tested with data on bombings perpetrated by the Francoist side in 1,062 municipalities of Catalonia duri…
Party Polarisation and Spatial Voting in Spain
In this article, we examine which political issues are considered most important by the Spanish electorate. Although a variety of potentially relevant issues are available, voters are forced to summarise them in just one vote. Thus, they need to prioritise some issues over others. This article analyses which issues end up being the most important for the Spanish electorate when they decide their vote, and why some issues become more influential t…
The Consequences of Victimization on Political Identities: Evidence from Spain
This article explores the impact of war-related traumatic experiences on political identities and political behavior by exploring different pieces of empirical evidence from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and its aftermath. On one hand, the author analyzes semistructured interviews of survivors of the civil war and the dictatorship; on the other hand, she assesses data from a specialized survey implemented on …
Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars
Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do “technologies of rebellion” impact a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civil…
Bridging Micro and Macro Approaches on Civil Wars and Political Violence: Issues, Challenges, and the Way Forward
This article reflects on the importance of linking micro and macro levels of analysis in order to advance our current understanding of civil wars and political violence processes and discusses the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We first identify the main problems in research on political violence that is focused on a single level of analysis and describe the challenges faced by research that attempts to establish connections…
Preferences for Inter-Regional Redistribution
What explains individual support for inter-regional redistribution? Few studies examine support for regional redistribution, even though such issues are politically salient in many democracies. We test models that hypothesize that such preferences are affected by regional and individual income, as well as other arguments beyond the traditional political economy framework. We focus on informational assumptions and implications of these models with…
Warfare, political identities, and displacement in Spain and Colombia
The determinants of low-intensity intergroup violence: The case of Northern Ireland
What accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? This article explores the determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. Low-intensity violence comprises a variety of events from riots to attacks against other civilians as well as against homes and symbolic buildings such as churches. We argue that this violence is more likely and prevalent in interface areas where…
Rivalry and Revenge: The Politics of Violence during Civil War
What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? This innovative book connects pre-war politics to patterns of violence during civil war. It argues that both local political rivalry and local revenge account for violence against civilians. Armed groups perpetrate direct violence jointly with local civilians, who collabora…
Using a natural experiment to estimate the electoral consequences of terrorist attacks
This study investigates the consequences of terrorist attacks for political behavior by leveraging a natural experiment in Spain. We study eight attacks against civilians, members of the military, and police officers perpetrated between 1989 and 1997 by Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), a Basque terrorist organization that was active between 1958 and 2011. We use nationally and regionally representative surveys that were being fielded when the attacks…
Dynamics of internal resettlement during civil war: Evidence from Catalonia (1936-39)
This article explores the dynamics of internal resettlement in times of civil war by using a novel dataset of all municipalities of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), which includes information on the total number of internally displaced from other parts of Spain that sought refuge in Catalan localities during the civil war. The dataset, which also incorporates information on relevant covariates, is built with a combination of prim…
New findings from conflict archives: An introduction and methodological framework
As they pursue information and deploy violence during conflict, combatants compose, catalog, and preserve a wide variety of records, such as memos, investigative reports, and communiqués. In an increasing number of post-conflict scenarios, these records are being archived and released publicly, quickly becoming a critical new source of data for studies of peace and conflict. The objective of this special issue is to advance a new research agenda …
Violence, Resistance, and Rescue during the Holocaust
What do different forms of anti-Semitic violence during World War II teach us about the comparative study of political violence? In this article, we review three recent political science books about the perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, the responses of their Jewish victims, and the rescue efforts that helped European Jews evade violence. These books demonstrate promising theoretical, empirical, and methodological uses for the rich historica…
Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide
Early research on wartime violence against civilians highlighted a distinction between macro- and micro-level approaches. Macro-level approaches, grounded in the international relations subfield, focus on variation across countries or conflicts, while micro-level approaches, more influenced by the comparative politics subfield, focus on variation within countries or conflicts. However, some of the recent research on civilian targeting does not fi…
Do Transitional Justice Museums Persuade Visitors? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Do transitional justice museums persuade visitors? We implement a novel field experiment at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile to understand the effects of governments' attempts to shape citizens' attitudes through symbolic transitional justice policies such as museums and memorials. Our findings suggest that though perceptions of the museum vary along ideological lines, Chilean university students display greater support fo…
Violent victors: Why bloodstained parties win postwar elections
Journal Article Violent victors: why bloodstained parties win postwar elections Get access Violent victors: why bloodstained parties win postwar elections. By Sarah Zukerman Daly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2022. 352pp. £100.00. Isbn978 0 69123 132 7. Available as e-book. Laia Balcells Laia Balcells Georgetown University,USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 99, …
The "Weight" of Territorial Issues: Evidence from Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland
Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present ev…
The Wars of Others: The Effect of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on Spanish Nationalism
Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, third-party states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Sp…
Social costs and policy preferences: Evidence from territorial strategies in Catalonia
Research on territorial preferences in self‐determination disputes has traditionally focused on economic and identity‐related factors. However, the impact of social costs—encompassing overall societal comfort and conviviality—on specific preferences for territorial strategies remains understudied. This paper presents a novel perspective by investigating how social costs affect such policy preferences in Catalonia, a region in Spain where secessio…
Territorial disputes and affective polarization
Can territorial disputes within countries be a basis for affective polarization? If so, how does it vary across territories? A burgeoning literature on affective polarization has largely focused on partisan divisions; we argue that contentious political issues such as those relating to territorial integrity can also be a basis for such affective polarization, where citizens feel concord with those sharing such policy preferences and animus for th…
The Troubles and Beyond: The impact of a museum exhibit on a post‐conflict society
In divided societies, can museums contribute to healing and recovery? While efforts to memorialize past violence typically aim to promote tolerance and reconciliation, remembering could exacerbate divisions in recovering societies where the past is deeply contested. We examine a transitional justice museum exhibit in Northern Ireland. We combine evidence from nearly 1,400 participants across focus groups, a field experiment at the Troubles and Be…
Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (15 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (12 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Spanish Civil War (9 works)