Dr. Lea Kaftan and Stefan Stojkovic presented ongoing work from the DANGER project at different venues of the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Montreal, Canada. Kaftan presented preliminary results on government formation in European interwar democracies at the main conference. Based on the ABEL data on political parties and cabinets, early analyses show that government formation during the interwar period differs in one main respect from dynamics in more recent years: political elites form on average larger than necessary coalitions. “We need to see if these results hold”, said Nils-Christian Bormann, the principal investigator of the DANGER project. “If they do, it means that we found a first indication that political elites were more cautious when forming governments during the turbulent interwar years than in recent years.”
Stefan Stojkovic, one the project’s PhD researcher, presented his work on democratic deconsolidation in interwar Eastern Europe at a pre-conference workshop organized by the prestigious Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA). The workshop brought together world-leading researchers on sub-national elections, and the organizers had invited Stojkovic to share his expertise on sub-national elections in interwar Europe. Stojkovic’ research centers on the dynamics of sometimes violent electoral competition at the local level and its connection to a decline in democratic quality.