(Page 1 of 24) - Unpacking Institutions and Ethnic Conflict: Analyzing Democracy�s Influence on Different Forms of Communal Dissent authored by Saideman, Stephen., Lanoue, David., Cox, Amy. and Weeraratne, Suranjan.

Unpacking Institutions and Ethnic Conflict:

Analyzing Democracy’s Influence on Different Forms of Communal Dissent

Stephen M. Saideman, McGill University

David Lanoue, University of Alabama

Amy Cox, McGill University

Suranjan Weeraratne, McGill University

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McGill University
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Paper prepared for Presentation at the Meeting of the American Political Science Association,
September 1-5

, 2004, Chicago, IL

Acknowledgements: We thank Ted Gurr, Christian Davenport, Randi Mack, Amy Pate, Anne
Pitsch and Michael Johns of the Minorities at Risk Project for providing access to the Minorities
At Risk Dataset and assistance in using it. We are grateful for the funding of this research by the
Canada Research Chairs program and by a grant from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities
Research Council. Michael Campenni and Sam Stanton collected the first round of data, and
David Lehman helped to update the current version, and for this we are quite thankful. We
appreciate Ted Gurr, James Scarritt, Pat James, Spyridon Kotsovilis, Andre Lecours, and the
McGill Social Statistics Workshop for providing insightful suggestions. Any errors remaining
are the responsibility of the co-authors. The paper was previously presented at the Annual
Meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, Québec, March 17-20, 2004.

Abstract: This paper considers the relationships between democracy and different forms of
ethnic conflict. Only recently have scholars sought to unpack ethnic conflict and take seriously
the variations in causes and dynamics of different forms of dissent. This article continues in this
direction by considering how institutions interact with various kinds of ethnic strife, both to
understand ethnic conflict in general and to consider more seriously the impact of democratic
structures on communal conflict. We consider three different forms of ethnic conflict—protest,
conflict among groups, and violence against the state. In particular, we focus on whether ethnic
conflict rises or falls due to the dynamics of the election cycle. We perform analyses, using a
time series-ed version of the Minorities at Risk Dataset from 1985-1998. We find that each form
of dissent is, indeed, distinct, and that elections are not as destabilizing as expected. Indeed,
some forms of conflict decline during elections. We discuss our results and the implications for
broader debates about political institutions and ethnic conflict.