Electoral Regimes and the Proscription of

At its most general level of abstraction, our shared topic - democratic elections and their relationship to political violence - concerns issues of statecraft: How can we devise durable and stable democracies? More specifically, our common inquiry is whether and how elections in constitutional democracies encourage or inhibit political violence, often the most significant and always the most arresting challenge to the durability of democracies. Implicit in our effort is an assumption I embrace without much critical examination, namely that the choices we make about the design and structure of elections in constitutional democracies can have a significant impact on democratic stability.1