2022/12/23 by Andrea Castro Marcucci, Dominic Rohner, Alessandro Saia · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Political Conflict and Governance #Agricultural risk and resilience
paper · doi:10.1093/ej/ueac092
openalex publication_date 2022/12/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract Does democracy curb domestic political violence? To study this, we focus on the United Kingdom’s Representation of the People Act of 1867—which is a critical juncture in the history of democratisation. Constructing a novel borough (‘urban centre’) level dataset on social conflict events and economic performance around the 1868 elections (the first elections where newly enfranchised citizens could vote), we exploit arguably exogenous variation in enfranchisement intensity. We find a strong and robust peace-promoting effect of franchise extension and identify as a major channel of transmission the increase of the population’s political influence (voice) and local economic growth.