Laia Bacell I Ventura
Biographic Data
| ID | 382844 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laia Bacell I Ventura |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laia Bacell I |
| FAMILY NAME | Ventura |
| SIGNATURE | VENTURA L B I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2922-4123 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Generational legacies of authoritarianism: Evidence from Spain
What are the long-term legacies of authoritarian repression on civil society? While much research has focused on high-intensity repression, we examine the more pervasive, low-intensity repression characteristic of many authoritarian regimes. We argue that repression’s effects vary by generation, reducing civic engagement among those who came of age during the authoritarian period but not among younger generations who either only lived their child…
National Attachment, Past In-Group Perpetratorhood, and Out-Group Attitudes
Exclusionary attitudes are often justified by histories of conflict. A large body of literature explores how making in-group victimhood salient can affect attitudes towards out-groups. Much less, however, has been done to study how episodes in history that position the in-group as perpetrators may reduce or exacerbate animosity towards the victimized group. We fill this gap by studying antisemitism in contemporary Spain. Using a well-powered and …
Re-Stigmatizing the Radical Right: A One-Way Street
Radical right behavior and support for radical right parties have increased across many countries in recent decades. A growing body of research has argued that, similar to the spread of other extremist behaviors, this is due to an erosion of political norms. This suggests that re-stigmatizing radical right parties might be an effective way of countering their growth. We use a survey experiment in Spain that compares the effectiveness of three the…
Legacies of Repression and Resistance in Early 20 th Century Europe
Authoritarian and violent experiences affect the institutional settings of post-dictatorial regimes. However, we still lack a comprehensive knowledge on how local autocratic practices of violence, repression and control influence post-dictatorial subnational politics. This special issue aims to advance our understanding of the legacies of authoritarian political regimes. It focuses on the experience of several European countries before, during an…
Discounting extreme positions: Party Normalization and Support for the Far Right
When are far right parties punished for their extreme positions? We argue that the punishments of deviant position-taking are conditional on the degree to which a far right party is normalized or stigmatized in the party system. When the far right is treated as normal, the costs suffered from these parties’ extreme positions decrease, as moderate voters discount the authenticity of their commitment to such positions. We use a survey experiment to…
Formal Institutions After Conflict: Rebel Ideology and Post-War Constitutional Design
How do formal institutions emerge and change after a civil war? Complementing explanations focused on distributional conflict and the promotion of post-war peace and democracy, we argue that ideology plays a central role in shaping the most fundamental formal institution: the constitution. Using data from 153 civil wars between 1944–2016, we find that in the post-war period: (1) Victorious revolutionary socialist (RS) and secessionist rebels are …
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…
Ideology and Revolution in Civil Wars: "The "Marxist Paradox
Powered by Marxist ideology, Revolutionary Socialist (RS) armed groups launched formidable challenges against incumbent regimes during the historical era of the Cold War. As both transformational and transnational actors, they were optimally positioned to execute a revolutionary war doctrine that called for a highly integrated political and military organization that could weave a dense web of interactions with civilian populations. Civil wars fe…
Remembering the Violent Past in Ethnically Divided Societies
How can remembrance initiatives engage the public in a collective exploration of their past when the dominant historical narratives within that public are deeply contested? How does engaging with commemorative efforts affect those living in post-conflict societies, and what role might museums play in dealing with such contested pasts? We address these research questions through a multi-method study in Northern Ireland, focusing on the Ulster Muse…
Internal drivers of self-rule referendums
From Catalonia to Kurdistan to Scotland, referendums have increasingly become popular strategies of self-rule movements. Despite this, many referendums are considered failures by the movements (revealing a dearth of support), some are marred by violence, and few garner external backing. Given this, when are they likely to be employed? We argue that internal competition serves as one driving force for actors to use referendums as a way to gain or …
Social Cohesion, Economic Security, and Forced displacement in the Long-run: Evidence From Rural Colombia
Millions of people around the world are internally displaced. And yet – compared to other forms of wartime victimization – scholars know relatively little about the long-run consequences of displacement for victims. This gap in the literature is problematic since displacement is distinct from other forms of victimization, and because IDPs face unique challenges in post-conflict transitions. This study contributes to the literature on the effects …
Thank You to Reviewers
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…
Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation by Paul Staniland
Journal Article Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation by Paul Staniland Get access Paul Staniland. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2021. 360 pp. Paper, $34.95. Laia Balcells Laia Balcells Georgetown University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2922-4123 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, qqad059, https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad0…
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…
Secessionist conflict and affective polarization: Evidence from Catalonia
Can secessionism be a basis for affective or social polarization? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarization, a key mechanism theorized as increasing the risk of violent conflict, remains less understood. We argue that the issue of secession can affectively polarize along both policy and ethnic group lines even in the case of nonviolent disputes, and posit a number of expectations regarding such secessioni…
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…
Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Rebel Constituencies and Civil War Alliances
Challenging influential perspectives that downplay the role of shared rebel constituencies, we argue that they represent important causes of rebel alliances. Yet, we theorize distinct effects for different types of constituency. While compatible political aspirations push both organizations with a common ideological constituency and those with a common ethnic constituency to ally, for co-ethnic organizations this cooperation-inducing effect is of…
Preferences in Between: Moderates in the Catalan Secessionist Conflict
Recent research on territorial preferences focuses on explaining who supports or opposes independence. However, this research overlooks the relevance of an “intermediate” category of citizens who may oppose the territorial status quo of a sub-state territory but not support independence. We use evidence from the critical case of Catalonia to illustrate the relevance of individuals with such preferences for policies and outcomes highly relevant to…
Do TJ policies cause backlash? Evidence from street name changes in Spain
Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is re…
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…
Repression and Dissent in Contemporary Catalonia
An extensive literature in political science and sociology has analyzed how state repression shapes attempts by social movements to pursue political objectives. Less studied, however, is the effect that state repression of activists has on the broader public. Understanding public responses to repression is important, as both states and social movements take action with an eye toward (de)mobilizing broader constituencies. This letter analyzes this…
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…
Repression and Dissent in Contemporary Catalonia
An extensive literature in political science and sociology has analyzed how state repression shapes attempts by social movements to pursue political objectives. Less studied, however, is the effect that state repression of activists has on the broader public. Understanding public responses to repression is important, as both states and social movements take action with an eye toward (de)mobilizing broader constituencies. This letter analyzes this…
Economic Crisis, Globalization, and Partisan Bias: Evidence from Spain
Who do citizens blame for the recent European economic crisis? In this paper, we test theories about blame attribution with respect to the economic crisis. We argue that blame for the crisis is partially conditioned by partisan bias and framings of the crisis as being related to globalization. We test the argument with new survey data and a survey experiment from Spain. In the experiment, respondents receive different framings of the economic cri…
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…
Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Rebel Constituencies and Civil War Alliances
Challenging influential perspectives that downplay the role of shared rebel constituencies, we argue that they represent important causes of rebel alliances. Yet, we theorize distinct effects for different types of constituency. While compatible political aspirations push both organizations with a common ideological constituency and those with a common ethnic constituency to ally, for co-ethnic organizations this cooperation-inducing effect is of…
Do TJ policies cause backlash? Evidence from street name changes in Spain
Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is re…
Mass Schooling and Catalan Nationalism
In 1659, the kingdoms of France and Spain signed the Treaty of Pyrenees, a peace treaty by which a piece of the Spanish territory became part of France. Since then, Catalan identity has persisted on both sides of the border. However, while this identity is today politically and socially relevant in Spain, it is not in France. This article argues that this variation can be explained by the characteristics of the historical process of the spread of…
Secessionist conflict and affective polarization: Evidence from Catalonia
Can secessionism be a basis for affective or social polarization? Despite much research on independence movements, their relationship to polarization, a key mechanism theorized as increasing the risk of violent conflict, remains less understood. We argue that the issue of secession can affectively polarize along both policy and ethnic group lines even in the case of nonviolent disputes, and posit a number of expectations regarding such secessioni…
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…
Preferences in Between: Moderates in the Catalan Secessionist Conflict
Recent research on territorial preferences focuses on explaining who supports or opposes independence. However, this research overlooks the relevance of an “intermediate” category of citizens who may oppose the territorial status quo of a sub-state territory but not support independence. We use evidence from the critical case of Catalonia to illustrate the relevance of individuals with such preferences for policies and outcomes highly relevant to…
Las actitudes de los españoles ante las medidas de justicia transicional relativas a la Guerra Civil y al franquismo
Se ha hablado mucho de los determinantes institucionales de la justicia transicional (JT). Sin embargo, el conocimiento de qué variables condicionan las actitudes de los ciudadanos ante las políticas de reparación por violaciones de los derechos humanos sigue siendo escaso. En este artículo se explota una encuesta original del CIS realizada en 2008 a una muestra representativa de la población española. Un año antes, el Gobierno socialista había a…
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…
La muerte está en el aire: Los bombardeos en Cataluña, 1936-1939
Este artículo analiza la variación en los bombardeos que tienen lugardurante guerras civiles de tipo convencional. Se plantean varias hipótesispartiendo de un marco teórico que pone el acento en el papel delos factores políticos para explicar la violencia. Además, se tienen encuenta factores emocionales como las aspiraciones de venganza de losciudadanos. Las hipótesis se ponen a prueba mediante datos sobre losbombardeos perpetrados por el bando f…
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…
Ariel Ahram: Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias Timothy D. Sisk: International Mediation in Civil Wars: Bargaining with Bullets Amalendu Misra: Politics of Civil Wars: Confl…
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 …
Mass Schooling and Catalan Nationalism
In 1659, the kingdoms of France and Spain signed the Treaty of Pyrenees, a peace treaty by which a piece of the Spanish territory became part of France. Since then, Catalan identity has persisted on both sides of the border. However, while this identity is today politically and socially relevant in Spain, it is not in France. This article argues that this variation can be explained by the characteristics of the historical process of the spread of…
Economic Crisis, Globalization, and Partisan Bias: Evidence from Spain
Who do citizens blame for the recent European economic crisis? In this paper, we test theories about blame attribution with respect to the economic crisis. We argue that blame for the crisis is partially conditioned by partisan bias and framings of the crisis as being related to globalization. We test the argument with new survey data and a survey experiment from Spain. In the experiment, respondents receive different framings of the economic cri…
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 …
The Double Logic of Internal Purges: New Evidence from Francoist Spain
States often engage in internal purges to eliminate political dissidents within their own ranks. However, partly because of the absence of reliable data, we know little about the logic and dynamics of these purges, particularly of lower-rank members of the state. Why do state authorities persecute these individuals when they do not entail a clear threat to the regime? We focus on the purges of public-school teachers during the early years of Fran…
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…
Preferences in Between: Moderates in the Catalan Secessionist Conflict
Recent research on territorial preferences focuses on explaining who supports or opposes independence. However, this research overlooks the relevance of an “intermediate” category of citizens who may oppose the territorial status quo of a sub-state territory but not support independence. We use evidence from the critical case of Catalonia to illustrate the relevance of individuals with such preferences for policies and outcomes highly relevant to…
Do TJ policies cause backlash? Evidence from street name changes in Spain
Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is re…
Political science (45 works) · Law (34 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (27 works) · Political economy (25 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (20 works) · Economics (15 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (14 works) · Spanish Civil War (14 works)