Prewar Public Discourse: Letters to Politika, Belgrade, 1988–1991

in Europe-Asia Studies (2022)

We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4,000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika ... [more ▼]

We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4,000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combined lexicon-based tools of automated topic and sentiment analysis with data on the sociodemographic characteristics of the letter writers and their localities. The results of our analysis show the importance of the politicisation of a history of violence in shaping public discourse in the run-up to war. [less ▲]

Ethnic Bias after Ethnic Conflict: Preferential Voting and the Serb Minority in Croatian Elections

in Ethnopolitics (2021)

In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article ... [more ▼]

In spite of growing interest in democratization and electoral competition after ethnic conflict, we know little about the impact of ethnic violence on voter choice in post-conflict societies. This article uses an original dataset of local-level electoral results, communities’ exposure to war violence, and candidates’ ethnicity derived from names in contemporary Croatia to uncover the relationship between local post-conflict ethnic distribution, ethnic violence, and the electorate’s ethnic bias. Our analysis points to the presence of ethnic bias that is determined by local interethnic balance and exposure to war violence – particularly for communities populated by the Serb minority. [less ▲]

Voting and winning: perceptions of electoral integrity in consolidating democracies

in Democratization (2021), 28(8), 1423-1441

How do voters in consolidating democracies see electoral integrity? How does election affect the change in perception of electoral integrity among these voters? What role does winning play in seeing an ... [more ▼]

How do voters in consolidating democracies see electoral integrity? How does election affect the change in perception of electoral integrity among these voters? What role does winning play in seeing an election as free and fair? Building on the theory of the winner-loser gap, we answer these questions using original two-wave panel surveys we conducted before and after three parliamentary elections in Southeast Europe in 2018 and 2020. The article focuses on changes of perception of electoral integrity as a function of satisfaction with the electoral results in contexts where the quality of elections has always been at the centre of political conflict. We specifically explore the socialization effect of elections in environments with notoriously low trust in political institutions and high electoral stakes. The article goes beyond the “sore loser” hypothesis and examines voters’ both political preferences and personal characteristics potentially responsible for the change in perception of electoral integrity over the course of electoral cycle. [less ▲]

Understanding Electoral Violence through Complex Textual Data: OSCE Monitoring Missions in Different Contexts

in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (2021), 44(8), 646-667

The paper analyses more than 20 years of evidence on electoral violence as reported by OSCE monitoring mission reports. It identifies prevailing trends of electoral violence in the OSCE participating ... [more ▼]

The paper analyses more than 20 years of evidence on electoral violence as reported by OSCE monitoring mission reports. It identifies prevailing trends of electoral violence in the OSCE participating states in order to better understand how the phenomenon is understood and framed by leading international monitoring organizations in the region. The analysis utilizes a unique approach based on automated content analysis employing counting algorithms and latent semantic indexing. The results of the analysis show how electoral violence differs throughout the region while highlighting the qualitative variations in regional patterns of the reported incidents of election-related violence. [less ▲]

Talking War: Representation, Veterans and Ideology in Post-War Parliamentary Debates

in Government and Opposition (2020), Online

How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the ... [more ▼]

How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed records of war service for all members of parliament during two recent terms in Croatia. We demonstrate not only that veteran politicians talk about war differently from their non-veteran counterparts, but also that the sentiment of war-related political discourse is highly dependent on the speaker’s exposure to combat and ideological orientation. These results improve our understanding of the representational role played by combat veterans, as well as of the link between descriptive and substantive representation of vulnerable groups in post-war societies. [less ▲]

Power-sharing and democratization in Africa: the Kenyan experience

in Journal of International Relations and Development (2020), 23(3), 607-635

Modelling the Legacies of War Violence: Voters, Parties, Communities

in Anali Hrvatskog politološkog društva: časopis za politologiju (2019), 15(1), 77-101

Wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. Political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake ... [more ▼]

Wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. Political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. That is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. This article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. Our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. We devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in Southeast Europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme. [less ▲]

Looking Eastward: Network Analysis of Czech Deputies and their Foreign Policy Groups

in Problems of Post-Communism (2019), 66(6), 418-433

The paper analyses a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bi- and multi ... [more ▼]

The paper analyses a structure of relations among the members of the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, as reported through their memberships in bi- and multi-lateral groups of friendship which establish professional contacts between the Chamber of Deputies and foreign parliaments. We approach the structure as a social network of MPs and interpret the memberships as proxy indicators of their interests/preferences in foreign affairs. The paper shows that inter-parliamentary groups construct a self-sustained independent structure for parliamentary diplomacy which may significantly differ from the official positions of the Government. We find that the studied network has a centralized core-periphery structure, in which deputies who are less prominent and those interested in authoritarian regimes occupy more central positions. The paper connects the findings with the current debates on Central European tendencies to look for allies in large authoritarian regimes (Russia and China), for which we argue the interparliamentary groups might play the role of an important communication channel. [less ▲]

Electoral Violence in the Western Balkans. From Voting to Fighting and Back

Book published by Routledge (2018)

Politické strany v české zahraniční politice

in Kořan, Michal (Ed.) Aktéři a tvorba české zahraniční politiky (2017)