Exclusionary Politics: Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political exclusion is a core area of study within political science. Scholars approach this topic from different perspectives depending on their research question and their sub-field orientation. Exclusion takes different forms and occurs both violently, and non-violently—or less violently. At one extreme, individuals or groups are eliminated from society through targeted killings and in some cases genocide or mass expulsion. At the other, different forms of discrimination, legal and illegal, are used to separate and suppress the participation of certain people in society. This panel is focused on questions of conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement in the field of exclusionary politics. It explores the concepts that are used, how they are defined, and what they include and exclude. It also probes how concepts are operationalized for quantitative testing, and how a narrow or broad operationalization affects what events are included or excluded. Furthermore, it assesses how the measurement of those concepts, and the argument’s scope conditions, affect what is explained and how far the results can travel.

The five papers in this panel examine different forms of exclusionary politics, but each has wrestled with the core issues of conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement when building datasets, selecting their universe of cases, and defining the boundaries of inclusion. Van Nostrand, Braithwaite, and Solomon present a robust conceptualization of concentration camp systems and introduce a new dataset of the global use of these systems between 1896 and 2018. Livny investigates a more subtle exclusionary practice, showing how states use census enumeration to strategically include or exclude certain ethnic and religious categories, shaping the documented diversity of the country, and how individual citizens choose to self-identify. Schwartz, Steele, and Lichtenheld show how forced migrants’ political, ethnic, and racial profiles impact the type of exclusionary practices governments use toward them in their Government Responses to Internal and International Displacement (GRIID) dataset. Guliford details how one’s conceptualization of military intervention impacts what is and what is not included, impacting the universe of cases and the results identified. Lastly, Garrity and Mylonas, examine how exclusionary politics have been studied from various vantage points as an outgrowth of different subfields—migration, conflict, nation-building—focused on different aspects of exclusionary politics.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Concentrated Cruelty: New Data on the Global Use of Concentration Camp Systems - Alex Braithwaite, University of Arizona; Rachel Dawn Van Nostrand, University of Arizona; Daniel Solomon, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• Count Me Out: Political Exclusion in National Censuses - Avital Livny, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Reconceptualizing Military Intervention - Meg K. Guliford, Drexel University

• Nesting Exclusionary Politics Approaches - Meghan Garrity, George Mason University; Harris Mylonas, George Washington University

Chair

• Melani Cammett Harvard University

Discussants

• Laia Balcells Georgetown University

• Jessica Stanton Temple University