Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ELWar (Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe)

Teaser

How does war shape postwar politics? To which extent is electoral competition in postwar societies determined by the war past as opposed to the peacetime present and future? How does war become embedded into postwar political norms, practices, narratives, and institutions?War...

Summary

How does war shape postwar politics? To which extent is electoral competition in postwar societies determined by the war past as opposed to the peacetime present and future? How does war become embedded into postwar political norms, practices, narratives, and institutions?

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. And yet we have little systematic and theoretically supported grasp of its impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in its wake.

ELWar – Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe is a five-year project that aims at understanding the political legacies of war by focusing on the evolution of political competition over the period of almost 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. This has 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, our project aims at filling the gap in understanding the real extent of political legacies of war.

To reach this ambitious goal, Southeast Europe offers great potential for a truly comparative and systematic study. With almost three decades of postwar political life in no less than six different countries and a great variety of war and postwar experiences (civil conflict versus external aggression, emigration versus immigration, defeat versus stalemate versus victory, military versus civilian casualties), former Republic of Yugoslavia is an extraordinary political laboratory offering possibilities to get breakthrough insights about the mechanisms that shape postwar elections, voter choice, parties and political cleavages.

Three levels of analysis – postwar voters, postwar parties, and postwar communities – have been set and each one is explored using a large array of methodological tools both quantitative and qualitative. Extensive databases of demographic, economic and political factors, registries of war veterans as well as of human losses, opinion surveys, oral history and elite interviews are collected at a large scale, analysed and combined using innovative approaches for this field in order to deliver a comprehensive view of postwar political life.

Work performed

During the reporting period, the major achievements have been:
- The recruitment of the complete team at the University of Luxembourg: two PDRAs and one part-time administrative assistant;
- The publication of a call for papers in preparation of the workshop “Postwar Voters: Violence, Loss, and Exile as Electoral Currencies” to be held on 22-23 February 2019 at the Maison Robert Schuman, Luxembourg, and the selection of the ten international scholars who will participate;
- The completion of all the maps for the future interactive online platform Crisis, Conflict, Competition in Southeast Europe ;
- The publication of the first peer-reviewed article of the project, entitled “Post-war voters as fiscal liberals: local elections, spending, and war trauma in contemporary Croatia” in April 2019 in East European Politics;
- The launch on October 1st, 2018, of a major survey (more than 10 000 respondents at this stage);
- One field travel of the Principal Investigator and one PDRA in Croatia;
- Dramatic leap forward in data collection and analysis, which will lead to major research and publication breakthroughs;
- The participation of the team to three international academic conferences;
- The set-up of all communication channels for the project: its website, its dedicated page on the University’s website, as well as its social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Research Gate). The launch of the project has also been subject to an introductory video advertised by the University of Luxembourg on YouTube and Facebook;
- And finally, the project has been the topic of three articles in the press: “Research into impact of war on electoral behaviour receives European grant” (Luxembourg Times, 19 October 2017), “Politik nach dem Balkankrieg” (Tageblatt, 4 December 2016), and “Zašto hrvatski birači više vole političare koji su rastrošni?” (Jutarnji List, 21 April 2018).

Final results

No change compared to the Grant Agreement.

Website & more info

More info: https://elwar.uni.lu/.