CIVIL DISCOURSE, INTER-GROUP TRUST AND VIOLENT BREAKDOWN: WHEN IS IT LEAST LIKELY?

By integrating insights from the literatures on trust, cascade theories of interdependent choices, democratic transition, and ethnic-religious conflict, this paper develops a parsimonious explanation for vulnerability to violent social breakdown. The paper then explains why rapid and violent breakdown could occur in Bosnia although it did not occur in cases including Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Turkey, in light of the theory developed. The argument offers a simple explanation for cross-regional variations in trust between ethnic-religious communities, and in vulnerability to violent breakdown, and complements existing explanations based in elite competition. It describes how an insincere public-political discourse under communism or any other authoritarianism, and institutions and policies that insufficiently promoted socioeconomic cooperation across ethnic-religious divisions, contribute to the pace and intensity of disintegration, if and when it occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]