{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02834410740924913, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005967180507210343, 'mean_word_length': 5.078549848942598, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Introduction to the Special Issue on Violence, Elections, and Party Politics

At a White House banquet held in his honor in March 1954, Winston Churchill observed that it was better to ‘‘jaw-jaw’’ than ‘‘war-war.’’ In the Cold War atmosphere of the time (Stalin had died the previous year), Churchill was maintaining that talking with the Soviet leadership was better than a nuclear confrontation between the two superpowers. Who would argue otherwise? Yet by treating talking and warring as opposites Churchill unintentionally calls our attention to a subject on which we intend to focus in this introduction. Surely few would deny that political parties, especially in the democratic world, are institutions that specialize in talking, just as armies specialize in warring. For parties, words are weapons. Political parties, their candidates for office—and elected representatives usually devote themselves to persuading others—rhetoric in other words—about the superiority of their preferences and candidates over those of their opponents. Violence belongs to another realm. But is this really true? Churchill’s own career suggests otherwise. After all, he combined great skill as a speech-maker and party politician with his role as a war-time leader during Britain’s moment of extreme threat from Nazi Germany. As with Churchill, so too with political parties; they too can combine careers of jawing and warring. Of course we might define the term ‘‘political party’’ in such a way as to preclude its involvement in violent operations. Its peacefulness would then be true, but true by definition. If we follow this sleight-of-hand technique we would have to deny that the Liberals and Conservatives who waged a civil war in Colombia from 1947 to the early 1960s—a conflict in which thousands lost their lives—were in fact political parties. Nor could we consider the German Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis during the Weimar Republic as political parties since they each had their own highly violent