Emergency Powers in Democratic States and the Outbreak of Conflic

How does the delicate balance between security and democracy shift during times of severe crisis? Answering this question entails first understanding exactly how and why the state's domestic institutions change during times of emergency. In this dissertation I significantly contribute to our ability to do so by providing the first comprehensive overview of emergency provisions in democratic states. While scholars have examined human rights violations under states of emergency [Hafner- Burton et al., 2011], scholars have yet to examine how emergencies change the distribution of political power within the state.;To remedy this, in Chapter 2 I present a systematic data collection on formal rules regarding states of emergency in democracies. For each provision, I have collected and codified the circumstances in which states of emergency can be declared, how long they last, the state's institutional structure during the state of emergency, and the extent and limitations of the powers granted to the state's leader to combat the crisis. Using Bayesian factor analysis, I develop a measure of the latent strength of the power of the executive in each of these emergency provisions across time.;Using this measure of emergency power strength within democracies, I then explore the origins of these powers in a systematic fashion. The elements that lead to an expectation of future turmoil, such as a history of violent political conflict or a looming international threat, increase the likelihood that states adopt stronger emergency powers. Additionally, states enact stronger emergency provision when they posses elements that exacerbate a time of emergency, such as institutional or physical features of the state that could increase grievance or decrease the government's ability to manage the population during times of crisis.;In Chapter 3, I study the impact of these emergency provisions on the outbreak of violence. Scholars argue that institutions in democracies constrain leaders and prevent international conflict. However, since many democracies specify rules of governance in times of emergency that divert substantial power to the head of state, the manipulation of these emergency powers provides a rational motivation for conflict. Using a novel dataset of emergency provisions within democracies, I test the relationship between emergency power strength and conflict propensity taking several steps to achieve causal inference, including an instrumental variable analysis that exploits the specificity of the state's constitution as a plausibly exogenous determinant of emergency power strength. I find that emergency power strength is a strong predictor of conflict onset in democracies in each test, and find that states with strong emergency powers are substantially more likely to enact a state of emergency due to an international conflict.;In Chapter 4, I consider a new type of violence - terrorist violence. Scholars frequently suggest that institutional constraints on the executive are necessary to prevent overly repressive executive actions that spur on further terrorist violence. However, few studies consider why an unconstrained executive might prefer to take such counterproductive action. Following recent work by Dragu & Polborn (2014), I suggest electoral incentives shape the leader's choices for how best to conduct counter-terror activity. I draw on experimental work regarding on individual response to terror to provide additional nuance to this theory, arguing that the public spurs on overly harsh reprisals for terror attacks that arise from an out-group but that terror events that arise from the in-group do not inspire such a response. I then test this argument empirically, using the nation of origin of the attacker to proxy for their social identity, and exploiting my data set on emergency power strength and data on declared states of emergency to capture within-country variation -- in addition to between country variation -- in executive constraints in democracies. I find that when emergency circumstances remove standard institutional constraints on the leader, the leader takes overly harsh counter terror measures that inspire further violence in the case of transnational terror but not domestic terror. This chapter greatly advances our understanding of the role of both democratic constraints and public preferences in driving or preventing terrorist violence.;The final section concludes with a discussion future avenues of research that will be possible using these data. These data allow scholars to consider the impact of terrorism on state institutions and human rights, as the motivating example suggests, as well as the influence of these institutions on the outbreak of international conflict and terrorist violence. This measure can further be used to assess the impact of emergency powers on a variety of political phenomena and examine a multitude of fundamental questions of comparative institutions, domestic political competition, civil unrest, natural disasters and more.