Mass Political Conflict: Origins and Impact on Political Change

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This is a study of the origins and consequences of mass political conflict. The project will achieve three goals: (1) develop multi-dimensional indicators of mass political conflict; (2) analyze the sources of mass conflict and associated changes in civil society during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods; and (3) examine the impact of mass conflict on democratization and political crises. Most political conflict is non-violent and occurs in the context of institutionalized civil society. It can be conceptualized in terms of three distinct dimensions, along which individual cases may vary: (1) contentiousness (or extra-institutionality); (2) coerciveness (intensity of negative sanctions); and (3) violent outcomes. This project will use behavioral measures to map recent global trends in these dimensions on an annualized basis between 1980 and 1998 and construct indicators that are backward compatible with the conflict and political change indicators in the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, thus creating a continuous time-series of 50 years. Mass conflict will be examined in terms of relative deprivation, resource mobilization and dependency theories, alongside newer theories about international political opportunities, ecological arguments about population pressure, ethnic competition processes, and state repression as contributing to conflict escalation. In addressing civil society, the research examines market development and ecological evolutionary explanations alongside religious and structural constraints on democratization. Democratization is examined as a process of stable regime transition driven by non-violent protest as well as elite bargaining and social structural facilitation. Analyses will rely on descriptive trend, lagged panel, pooled time-series and event history techniques. The research will employ innovative automated event coding techniques to analyze text from the Reuters World Newswire. The coding system is based on the Kansas Events Dat a System (KEDS) parser, and it uses the Protocol for Nonviolent Direct Action (PANDA) which defines the rules linking word phrases to coded events. This research will contribute to the important current debates about the future of civil politics around the world. It will provide an improved understanding of the factors that cause ethnic wars, genocides and state breakdowns that threaten the social fabric, or that manage potential conflicts peacefully. The research employs innovative computer techniques for analyzing written text, and thus it is a testing ground for improving these new tools that are so crucial for the future information infrastructure.