Mass Political Conflict: Origins and Impact on Political Change

这是一个关于大规模政治冲突的起源和后果的研究。 该项目将实现三个目标：（1）制定大规模政治冲突的多维指标;（2）分析冷战和冷战后时期大规模冲突的根源以及公民社会的相关变化;（3）研究大规模冲突对民主化和政治危机的影响。 大多数政治冲突是非暴力的，发生在制度化的民间社会中。 它可以从三个不同的方面加以概念化，沿着这些方面，个别情况可能有所不同：（1）有争议性（或体制外性）;（2）暴力性（消极制裁的强度）;（3）暴力后果。这个项目将使用行为措施来绘制1980年至1998年期间这些方面的年度全球趋势图，并制订与《世界政治和社会指标手册》中的冲突和政治变化指标向后兼容的指标，从而建立一个连续50年的时间序列。 大规模冲突将在相对剥夺，资源动员和依赖理论方面进行审查，以及关于国际政治机会，人口压力，种族竞争过程和国家镇压的生态论点的较新理论作为冲突升级的贡献。 在处理民间社会，研究审查市场发展和生态进化的解释，以及宗教和结构上的限制民主化。民主化被视为一个由非暴力抗议以及精英谈判和社会结构促进驱动的稳定政权过渡过程。 分析将依赖于描述性趋势、滞后面板、汇总时间序列和事件历史技术。 这项研究将采用创新的自动事件编码技术来分析来自路透社世界新闻专线的文本。 编码系统基于堪萨斯事件数据系统（KEDS）解析器，并使用非暴力直接行动协议（PANDA），该协议定义了将单词短语与编码事件联系起来的规则。 这项研究将有助于当前关于世界各地公民政治未来的重要辩论。 它将提供一个更好的理解的因素，造成种族战争，种族灭绝和国家崩溃，威胁社会结构，或和平管理潜在的冲突。 这项研究采用了创新的计算机技术来分析书面文本，因此它是改进这些对未来信息基础设施至关重要的新工具的试验场。

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.