Ongoing Projects
Territorial Autonomy, Subnational Autocratization, and the Risk of Intrastate Conflict
How does subnational autocracy affect the likelihood and severity of intrastate conflict in autonomous regions? Autonomy arrangements are a frequent tool for the regulation of intrastate conflicts in heterogeneous societies. So far, research has primarily measured autonomy’s “success” in terms of the prevention of the (re-)emergence of violence. This ignores the second goal of autonomy settlements: democracy promotion. We argue that autocratization in autonomies, i.e., subnational democratic regression or autocratic consolidation, is one of the main drivers of ethnic violence. Our research, which is based on decades of political science research on the democracy-peace nexus, puts this premise to the test on the subnational level. We built our analysis on a new conceptualization and measurement of substate autocracy through an expert survey and a cross-national dataset of conflict-regulating territorial autonomies.
Publications
Self-Rule and Intrastate Conflict Risk in Divided Societies: A Configurational Analysis of Consociational Institutions
Schulte, F. and Trinn, C. 2022. ‘Self-Rule and Intrastate Conflict Risk in Divided Societies. A Configurational Analysis of Consociational Institutions, In: Swiss Political Science Review, DOI: 10.1111/spsr.12514
Scholars debate whether self-rule is conducive to intrastate violence or peace. We argue that to resolve this problem the entire institutional setup of the state must be taken into account. Whereas the centripetalist view deemphasizes self-rule as a vehicle of interethnic competition, consociationalism holds that it is the interplay of accommodative institutions, with segmental autonomy among them, that promotes intrastate peace. We test the rivaling expectations on a set of 556 subnational cases in 21 culturally fractionalized post-war anocracies. We conduct a configurational risk analysis, which allows us to study self-rule and conflict risk under various institutional arrangements. We find that the full consociational ‘package’ is indeed associated with a reduction of intrastate conflict risk. However, majoritarian configurations are equally associated with a risk reduction. In contrast, models that include self-rule alone, or in combination with few other consociational elements, are consistently associated with an increase of conflict risk. Full article here.
Replication files:
Why we should stop the cherry-picking in the analysis of consociational institutions
Schulte, F. and Trinn, C. 2021. ‘Why we should stop cherry-picking in the analysis of consociational institutions’, 50 Shades of Federalism.
The research on consociationalism and conflict needs to take into account the interplay between consociational institutions such as self-rule, power sharing, parliamentarism, and proportional representation. In this article we present a configurational risk analysis of 556 subnational cases in 21 fractionalized post-war anocracies, which aims at identifying in which consociational configurations self-rule is associated with a reduction or rather increase of violent conflict risk. In our analysis, the full consociational package is indeed associated with a conflict risk reduction. However, consociationalism is not the only game in town, with majoritarianism being on par when it comes to peace promotion. In contrast, mixing institutions from both “worlds” is actually associated with an increase of conflict risk. Divided societies are therefore well advised to adopt consistent approaches of institutional engineering. Full article here.
Replication files:
Comparing Covid vaccination rates on subnational level
Data sources: TERRGO 2021 and Sociepy data on global vaccination rates. We use the total number of people who received all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol per 100 habitants. Figures made with gganimate.
Territorial Self-Governance Dataset 