Using Violence, Seeking Votes: Introducing the Militant Group Electoral Participation (MGEP) Dataset

Tactical Diversity in Militant Violence October 2015

Militant groups, like all organizations, face crucial decisions about the strategies that they employ. In this article, we assess why some militant organizations successfully diversify into multiple tactics while others limit themselves to just one or a few. This is an important puzzle because militants with increasingly diversified tactics are more likely to stretch counterterrorist defenses, ...

Translating into Votes: The Electoral Impacts of Spanish-Language Ballots

E-voting and electoral participation

Numerous studies show that, together with the United States, Switzerland presents the lowest average levels of turnout among established democracies. At the same time, Swiss voters are among those most frequently called to the polls, owing to the widespread possibilities for direct democracy on all three levels of the federal state. Not surprisingly, it is also in Switzerland that new means of ...

Sexual violence in armed conflict: Introducing the SVAC dataset, 1989–2009

Which armed groups have perpetrated sexual violence in recent conflicts? This article presents patterns from the new Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) dataset. The dataset, coded from the three most widely used sources in the quantitative human rights literature, covers 129 active conflicts, and the 625 armed actors involved in these conflicts, during the period 1989–2009. The unit of ob...

Group Entitlement, Anger and Participation in Intergroup Violence

Although a number of scholars have examined the determinants of intergroup violence, there is little research on why thousands of ordinary people take part in attacks on other ethnic, religious, sectarian, national, or partisan groups. This paper proposes a two-part emotional theory of participation. First, the theory argues that participants are driven by the emotion of intergroup anger. Anger...