A Time-Series Cross-National Dataset on Intra-State Violence

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。该项目的目标是建立第一个关于暴乱、政治杀戮、警察枪击等“小规模”暴力的跨国时间序列数据库，并将小规模暴力与大规模暴力联系起来。收集这些数据的直接目的是检验一个经典假设，即选举政治中种族分歧的政治化会导致国家内部暴力升级，从而导致民主稳定。尽管许多经典理论和直觉预测，选举政治中种族分裂的政治化应该与种族内部暴力的增加有关，但这些预测在很大程度上未经检验。缺乏经验验证的一个原因是缺乏内战或武装冲突以外的“小规模”国内暴力。这就是这个项目试图填补的空白。但该项目对智力的影响更为广泛。它将允许跨学科的社会科学家提出关于国内暴力的广泛问题，并以创新的方式处理这些问题。现有的跨国数据集产生了与大规模有组织暴力有关的少数措施，能够将暴力作为一个离散的“事件”或“结果”而不是“过程”进行分析，并且基于分析师对“事件”的单一解释。相比之下，该项目产生了大量描述小规模和大规模暴力的措施，能够对暴力作为一个过程和一个事件进行跨国实证分析，并结合了对暴力行为可以施加的多种解释的基本建构主义见解。为了使社会科学家社区能够使用和扩展这些数据，研究人员将相当重视文档和电子档案的创建，这些文档和电子档案将与数据一起在网络上提供。该项目还通过研究生和高级本科培训产生影响，通过两类学生参与该项目的协议开发和试点编码。数据对旨在预防暴力的政策的影响同样广泛。这种政策要求对小规模和大规模暴力的起因提出经经验验证的主张，并因此提出解决办法。预防小规模暴力本身就很重要，因为它会造成人员损失：骚乱、爆炸、枪击、杀戮等造成的累积伤亡，随着时间的推移，可能会对人的生命和政治制度的稳定造成巨大损失。这一点也很重要，因为有可能由于小规模事件的积累而不加以制止而发生大规模暴力。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The goal of this project is to construct the first cross-country time-series database on "small-scale" violence such as riots, political killings, police shootings and to link small-scale with large-scale violence. The immediate purpose in collecting these data is to test the classic hypothesis that the politicization of ethnic divisions in electoral politics leads to an escalation of intra-state violence and therefore democratic stability. Although a number of classic theories and intuitions predict that the politicization of ethnic divisions in electoral politics should be associated with an increase in intra-ethnic violence, these predictions are largely untested. One reason for this lack of empirical verification is the lack of of "small scale" intra-state violence short of civil war or armed conflict. That is the gap this project seeks to fill.But the intellectual impact of the project is broader. It will permit social scientists across disciplines to ask a large range of questions about civil violence, and approach them in innovative ways. Existing cross-national datasets generate a small number of measures relating to large-scale organized violence, enable the analysis of violence as a discrete "event" or "outcome" rather than a "process," and are based on a single interpretation imposed by the analyst on the "event." This project, by contrast, generates a large number of measures that describe small-scale as well as large-scale violence, enables cross-national empirical analysis of violence as a process as well as an event, and incorporates fundamental constructivist insights about the multiple interpretations that can be imposed on an act of violence. In order to enable the community of social scientists to use and extend these data, the researcher will pay considerable attention to documentation and the creation of electronic archives, which will be made available on the web along with the data. The project also has an impact through graduate and advanced undergraduate training through the involvement of both types of students in protocol development and pilot codings for this project.The impact of the data on policies aimed at the prevention of violence is similarly broad. Such policies require empirically verified propositions on the causes of and therefore solutions to small-scale as well as large-scale violence. The prevention of small-scale violence is important in its own right because of the human costs it imposes: the accumulated toll of riots, bombings, shootings, killings and so on can exact a large toll over time in both human lives and the stability of political systems. It is also important because of the possibility that large-scale violence might occur as the result of the accumulation of small-scale incidents that go unchecked.