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" Politics and Society After Violent Conflict "
Hadzic, Dino
Tavits, Margit
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1051173
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| Doc. No
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TL50290
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| Main Entry
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Hadzic, Dino
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| Title & Author
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Politics and Society After Violent Conflict\ Hadzic, DinoTavits, Margit
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| College
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Washington University in St. Louis
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2019
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| Note
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238 p.
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| Abstract
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In this dissertation, I examine how elite rhetoric about past inter-group violence affects citizens' post-conflict social and political attitudes. To do so, I conducted a survey experiment in the post-conflict country of Bosnia. In the first substantive chapter, I find that when individuals are reminded of the violence that was committed against their co-ethnics, they adopt negative views of out-group members. However, in the subsequent chapter, I find little evidence that this rhetoric induces individuals to ostracize co-ethnics who socially engage with out-groups. Combined, these findings indicate that (1) rhetoric about past violence makes reconciliation less likely by engendering negative attitudes toward out-groups, but (2) individuals who are open to inter-group engagement can still be effective conduits for positive inter-group contact. The next chapter considers how this kind of rhetoric impacts citizens' views of ethnic and multi-ethnic parties. I find that it reduces support for ethnic parties but not multi-ethnic ones. This suggests that recalling past violence generates negative attitudes toward the political actors who are the most clearly responsible for the original breakdown in peace: ethnic parties. Finally, in the last substantive chapter, I show that rhetoric about past violence does not significantly affect policy preferences. This provides reason for optimism in post-conflict societies, where elites may have little incentive to keep war memories alive because citizens' policy preferences are unlikely to respond in expected ways to such manipulation.
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| Descriptor
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Political science
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Social research
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Social structure
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Tavits, Margit
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Washington University in St. Louis
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