Exposure to Political Violence and Individual Behavior
EXPOVIBE is a 5-year research project funded by the European Research Council under the prestigious ERC Starting Grant Program. The principal investigator is Professor Arzu KIBRIS of Warwick University, Department of Politics and International Studies. The project is hosted by the University of Warwick in collaboration with Sabancı University (Istanbul, Turkey) as partner institute. The project took start in April 2017.
EXPOVIBE explores how exposure to political violence impacts upon the social, economic and political behavior of individuals. It has three legs. The first leg analyzes the association between political and domestic violence. More specifically, the hypothesis that those exposed to political violence are more likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence is tested. The second leg analyzes whether exposure to political violence impacts upon economic behavior and looks into the impact of exposure on a wide array of attitudes and behavior including risk, time and social preferences, savings behavior, employment, career choices and earnings. Finally, the third leg looks into political behavior. More specifically, the associations between exposure to political violence and a wide array of political attitudes and behavior including political participation and support, political tolerance, ideology and voting behavior are analyzed.
To answer these questions, two independent, large-n survey studies were conducted in Turkey in 2019. The first study, EXPOVIBE-Intimate Partner Violence (EXPOVIBE-IPV), surveyed 6,384 adult, married Turkish women to study the association between exposure to political violence and intimate partner violence. The second surveyed, EXPOVIBE-Conscript Veterans (EXPOVIBE-CV), 5,024 adult Turkish men to study the association between exposure to political violence and social, economic and political behavior.
EXPOVIBE is an innovative project in several respects. First of all, it relies on a population-level natural experiment that emanates from the institutional setup in Turkey. By removing endogeneity concerns, EXPOVIBE, therefore, allows causal inference and the identification of the population average treatment effects (PATE) of armed conflict exposure. Second, EXPOVIBE is designed to simultaneously analyze multiple important questions that concern several disciplines. The project is also innovative in its sampling design which yields clean treatment and control groups and rules out any confounding of effects and mechanisms. The design also brings together independent samples of adult males and females in an innovative way to maximize participant comfort and data quality while addressing potential scientific ethics issues. Finally, EXPOVIBE is innovative in terms of the richness of its data. Most existing microlevel studies from conflict areas are marred by the use of small samples of limited representativeness. EXPOVIBE relies on two large-n, representative samples.