Party Ideologies and Political Polarization-Driven Conflicts: A Study of the Global South

TL;DR

This study investigates how political party polarization influences armed conflicts in the Global South, revealing that polarization on issues like minority rights and religious principles significantly increases conflict risks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel polarization index based on social issues and employs multilevel modeling to analyze its impact on conflicts across different regions in the Global South.

Findings

Polarization on minority rights and religious principles strongly correlates with conflict severity.

Regional structural breaks indicate differing polarization-conflict dynamics across regions.

Vulnerable regions exhibit higher polarization-induced violence.

Abstract

Post-World War II armed conflicts have often been viewed with higher scrutiny in order to avoid a full-scale global war. This scrutiny has led to the establishment of determinants of war such as poverty, inequalities, literacy, and many more. There is a gap that exists in probing countries in the Global South for political party fragmentation and examining ideology-driven polarization's effect on armed conflicts. This paper fills this gap by asking the question: How does political identity-induced polarization affect conflicts in the Global South region? Polarization indices are created based on socially relevant issues and party stances from the V-Party Dataset. Along with control variables, they are tested against the response variables conflict frequency and conflict severity created from the UCDP (Uppsala Conflict Data Program). Through Chow's test, Regional Structural Breaks are found between regions when accounting for polarization-conflict dynamics. A multilevel mixed effects modelling approach is used to create region-specific models to find what types of polarization affect conflict in different geographies and their adherence to normative current developments. The paper highlights that vulnerable regions of the world are prone to higher polarization-induced violence. Modelling estimates indicate polarization of party credo on Minority Rights, Rejection of Political Violence, Religious Principles, and Political Pluralism are strong proponents of cultivated violence. The Global South's inhibitions and slow progress towards development are caused by hindrances from armed conflicts; this paper's results show self-inflicted political instability and fragmentation's influence on these events, making the case for urgency in addressing and building inter-group homogeneity and tolerance.