With regard to H2, it should be noted that by ‘semi democracies’ I here refer to regimes which are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. However, such regimes are often also transitional polities. Political change is complicated, and democratization can be marked by increased risk of internal conflict (Hegre et al., 2001). For example, voting may threaten the power of particular groups, which may use violence during elections or immediately postelection. This may be so because, while willing to accept democratic institutions in principle, these groups may not be willing to accept the transfer of power that is involved.<sup>8</sup> In line with this, Horowitz (1993) found that political change is particularly likely to be accompanied by civil conflict in countries with different ethnic minorities.

Hegre et al. (2001: 33) conclude that ‘intermediate regimes’, or semi democracies, are most prone to civil war, even when they have had time to stabilize from a regime change. However, the authors also note that in order to assess whether intermediate regime or regime transition (or both) are significant, one needs to control for each factor. Following this advice, I control for the time since regime change when testing H2.

# _3.2 The Impact of the Electoral System_

Political inclusion of minority groups is necessary to avoid the monopolization of political power by one ethnic group or another. Inclusion, however, does not follow automatically from all forms of democratic institutions (Rogowski & MacRae, 2004). Hence, I also consider the impact of a country’s level of political inclusiveness, proxied by its electoral system. Reynal-Querol (2002a,b) shows that what matters for conflict is not necessarily simply the degree of political freedom (or democracy), but rather the combination of this and the system of representation of the voters in government. More specifically, she found that proportional systems have a lower risk of conflict than majoritarian systems. Her explanation of this result is that the opportunity cost of rebellion is higher under proportional systems because such systems are likely to be more inclusive and curb grievances. It could also be the case that the lower risk of conflict in proportional systems is simply due to the fact that these systems are likely to be more inclusive and hence curb grievances. Reynal-Querol’s results corroborate with Binningsbø (2005), who in a large-N study of 118 post conflict societies between 1985 and 2002 found that power-sharing institutions as recommended by Lijphart (e.g. 1999), notably proportional representation systems and territorial autonomy, were positively associated with lasting peace. Despite such findings, Lijphart’s theory about consociational democracy in plural societies has also been met with scepticism.<sup>9</sup> For example, van den Berghe (2002) argues that the institutional model of consociational democracy mostly benefits the ruling elites.<sup>10</sup> Furthermore, Horowitz (2000) has criticized Lijphart on the grounds that the heterogeneous countries in Europe which form the basis of Lijphart’ s theory are not sufficiently comparable to deeply divided countries in Africa and Asia. In fact, Horowitz argues that a proportional representation system does not necessarily

> 8 Thanks to Frances Stewart for raising this point.

> 9 See Binningsbø (2005: 11–12) for an overview of this critique.

> 10 However, this could be true and yet also be pro-peace.

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