Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe

Project Information

ELWar

Grant agreement ID: 714589

DOI

10.3030/714589

Project closed

EC signature date 27 March 2017

Start date 1 April 2017

End date 31 March 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 788,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 788,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE DU LUXEMBOURG
Luxembourg

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - ELWar (Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe)

Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2022-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

War changes people and their communities. It creates refugees, veterans, orphans, profiteers, victims, perpetrators. It destroys polities’ social, economic, and physical fabrics. It profoundly alters social gender and class structures. “ELWar – Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe” aimed to improve our understanding of the long-term political legacies of war by focusing on the evolution of political competition over the period of three decades – from the early 1990s until the present – in six postwar states of Southeast Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Postwar elections have garnered tremendous interest from researchers in a variety of fields. However, this interest has most often been limited to establishing the relationship between electoral democratization and the incidence and intensity of conflict. With a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as a radically interdisciplinary, multi-method and innovative approach, ELWar aimed at filling the gap in understanding the real extent of political legacies of war.

Over the course of the project’s five years, ELWar team members focused their efforts on tackling three larger sets of research questions. First, how did experiences and views of war violence affect voter choice in post-conflict societies? Second, how did war histories feature in post-conflict parties’ and politicians’ strategies? And third, how did war histories become embedded in the social and political realities of the present? In order to answer those questions, the ELWar team collected and organized extensive data from a variety of sources. The team ran six rounds of public opinion and expert surveys in Southeast Europe with a total of more than 38 thousand respondents. Team members also created and analyzed datasets consisting of massive corpora of political discourse and the biographical information on its authors spanning more than two decades. They also created and analyzed large datasets with geocoded information on the tens of thousands of (changes in) street names, as well as construction and destruction of monuments. Using a broad spectrum of methodological approaches and techniques – from the newest developments in natural language processing to survey-embedded experiments – ELWar has made a number of significant advancements in the study of electoral competition in Southeast Europe and of post-conflict politics in general.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the course of the five years of the project, the ELWar team produced 22 peer-reviewed articles directly related to the project’s remit, of which 16 have been published, 3 are forthcoming, and 3 are under review. Nine additional peer-reviewed articles that are indirectly (most often methodologically) related to the project have also been published. Moreover, each of the three team members is working on their own monographs that are projected to be completed by the end of 2023. As important as these publications obviously are, however, they do not fully capture the breadth, importance, and impact of the work the ELWar team conducted over the past five years.

The project team members conducted four rounds of public opinion research in Southeast Europe with a total of more than 38 thousand respondents. The surveys and the project description reached more than 100,000 people through various online means of recruitment of survey respondents. The project team members also conducted two rounds of expert surveys on the political parties in Southeast Europe that build on and complement the standard bearers in the field like the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. All of these surveys have been properly documented and made available to the scholarly community in the open data repository. The project members also made available to the scholarly community datasets with massive corpora of political texts they processed and populated with extensive data on political discourse speakers. These corpora, containing millions of words in political speeches over the period of two decades represent a quantum leap forward in the study of political discourse in Southeast Europe and post-conflict societies in general.

Finally, team members did their utmost to reach out to the scholarly community and the general public in order to popularize their work and to ensure its social relevance. Two workshops were conducted that brought together 25 scholars from 17 different countries to present and discuss their work on post-conflict politics. Team members also produced 12 videos highlighting the project’s work, and they publicized their findings in two dozen press engagements in Southeast Europe and Luxembourg. Most importantly, they created two online platforms for the presentation of data collected and organized during the project. These two platforms – mapdat.uni.lu and lexics.uni.lu – will continue to grow and engage the public with the research output of the team members even after the project has ended.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project made significant progress beyond the state of the art in four important ways. First, it brought together the literatures on party politics and collective memories in a methodologically disciplined way. In a crowded field of studies on the politics of memory, ELWar distinguishes itself as the project that shows how parties’ different positions on the memorialization of war make a difference to voter choice, and it does that with some methodological rigor and solid data.

Second, ELWar overcame the issues of poor data, difficulties in conducting experimental research, and democratic deficit that plague many scholarly attempts at studying post-conflict politics in order to expose how the histories of war violence affect voter choice. Thanks to a dramatic effort in data collection and imputation that included the use of machine learning, the team was able to advance the field significantly when it comes to the effect of three critical variables on voter choice: combat experience, gender, and ethnicity.

Third, ELWar also significantly moved forward the field of discourse analysis by employing the newest advances in natural language processing (and customizing them for the languages of Southeast Europe) and machine learning, as well as by building massive corpora of millions of words of political speeches over the course of more than two decades that were paired with large datasets with a host of variables on the authors of this political discourse.

Finally, ELWar significantly advanced the field of study of post-conflict politics by dramatically broadening our lenses. Mainstream scholarship usually underestimates conflicts’ long-term consequences. A number of ELWar studies are significant breakthroughs because they show what lasting effects war can have. They show how the memory of war can obstruct the democratic process by preventing bad candidates from getting ousted, how this effect of war is passed onto the postwar generations, and how the impact of war permeates the very social fabric of postwar societies by structuring social relations and networks among people. ELWar publications provide concrete empirical evidence for the long-lasting and profound effects of war on postwar societies – and they do that by using a wide array of advanced methodological approaches: from survey-embedded experiments to network analyses.

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