Barriers to Coordination? Examining the Impact of Culture on International Mediation Occurrence and Effectiveness

‘Culture’ features prominently in the literature on international mediation: if belligerents share cultural characteristics, they are likely to have a common understanding and norms. This creates a common identity and makes coordination less costly, which ultimately facilitates mediation occurrence and effectiveness. Surprisingly, existing quantitative research largely neglects any cultural ties the antagonists might share with the mediator. This article addresses this gap by offering one of the first joint analyses of fighting parties’ and mediators’ culture – and the interaction thereof. Based on existing work, a theoretical framework for mediation occurrence and effectiveness is developed and innovative measures for belligerents’ cultural ties and the links to the mediator are used. Contrary to expectations the results suggest that larger cultural distances between antagonists make mediation more likely, while cultural dissimilarities between them and the mediator have the opposite effect. Evidence is also found for a conditional effect between the two culture variables on mediation occurrence

Not all elections are created equal: Election quality and civil conflict

Research on the dangers of democratization has long warned of the potential for elections to spark civil conflict. Yet, this work has remained surprisingly isolated from the burgeoning body of research on electoral integrity. We open the “black box” of elections to theorize how variation in their quality shapes the opportunities and incentives for military conflict. We argue that electoral integrity matters by influencing perceptions about the legitimacy of political outcomes and about actors’ willingness to play by the rules. While high-quality elections should not exacerbate the risk of civil conflict, low-integrity contests foster grievances and decrease the ability of the government and opposition to make credible commitments to avert violence. We find firm support for our hypothesis: flawed presidential elections increase the risk of conflict, especially in countries with a history of civil conflict. These findings are robust to methods to address the endogeneity of elections and electoral quality. © 2021 Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved