Can Political Conflict Be Resolved by Social Change? Northern Ireland as a Test Case

Each of the social sciences provides a different explanation of conflict about the very existence of a political regime. This article reviews a variety of theories hypothesizing that such conflicts are caused by social conditions such as religion, absence of modernity, class relations and material prosperity, and generational differences. Implicitly each suggests that political conflicts may be reduced or removed as a byproduct of social changes involving secularization, modernization, economic change, or generational change. The theories are tested with two sets of survey evidence from Northern Ireland, a society of particularly intense political conflict. The tests show that support for political conflict about the regime cannot be reduced to an explanation in terms of social conditions. Containing or resolving the political conflict requires explicitly political actions.