Abstract
Political violence poses an alarming threat to contemporary democracies and is often attributed to rising polarization. This paper investigates how democratic institutions moderate the relationship between identity-based polarization and violence, hypothesizing that this relationship depends upon a country’s institutional structure. Studying 113 democracies over time (1900−2023), we find that while identity-based polarization is associated with political violence, democracies with a federal structure and a rigid constitution show a significantly weaker relationship between polarization and violence. These results offer a rare positive perspective within polarization studies, showing that violence – polarization’s worst threat to democratic peaceful coexistence – is related to the institutional organization of conflict in society.
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