Political Regimes and Internal Conflict: A statistical analysis using automatically coded event data

Abstract

Democratization has been one of the main policy goals towards reducing internal conflicts in the last decade. However, recent conflict research, and recent events such as the many riots in European democracies, show that the relationship between democracy and internal peace is not as clear-cut as previously thought. This thesis uses new automatically coded event data to perform a statistical analysis of the relationship between regime and six types of internal conflict. I find strong support that democracies see more non-violent conflicts than other regimes. I also find strong support that authoritarian regimes see fewer of any conflicts than other regimes. Finally, I find mixed evidence on democracies and violent conflict; while democracies have a smaller chance of violent conflict initiation, they see more violent conflict events of some types than other regimes.