Call for papers
Postwar voters: Violence, loss, and exile as electoral currenciesWorkshop to be held at Maison Robert Schuman, University of Luxembourg
workshop: 22-23 February 2019
deadline for sending abstract: 1 April 2018
To what extent is postwar politics shaped by war past? Despite substantial scholarly interest in postwar elections and postwar societies in general, little is known about how electoral decisions of voters are affected by their war experiences. Insights into the nature of voter calculus in postwar elections are crucial for our understanding of democratic consolidation in nations previously torn by conflict. The ERC-funded project Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe (ELWar) studies how voters’ war experiences and perceptions of the past affect their contemporary electoral behavior in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. With this workshop, the ELWar project aims to bring together scholars working on similar topics, but with different regional and temporal concentrations, to advance our understanding of how war experiences shape voters’ long-term electoral behavior.
We encourage papers using a wide range of methodological approaches and with different regional and temporal concentrations, but we particularly welcome those using public opinion research, experiments, or network analyses and focusing on postwar regions other than Southeast Europe (we are especially interested in scholarship focusing on the post-Soviet space or the Middle East). Applicants can approach the topic from whichever perspective they deem appropriate, but we are particularly keen to see proposals focusing on war veterans, victims, refugees, as well as on the impact of gender in postwar voters’ electoral calculus.
Papers presented at this workshop will be published as an edited volume or as a special issue in a high-ranking journal in the field. Accommodation and travel expenses will be reimbursed for all selected workshop attendees. The workshop is to be held at Maison Robert Schuman, University of Luxembourg.