This article proposes rethinking democratic conflict management by acknowledging the increasingly important role policy plays in it. As the debate on the health of democracy intensifies, research on how democracies manage and absorb political and societal conflicts becomes broadly relevant. Existing theories and perspectives view conflict management through the lens of elections and other institutional mechanisms, or they examine the social and economic preconditions for successful conflict management while inadequately understanding how policies contribute to conflict management. The article develops a theoretical framework that allows for the analysis of how policies’ material and interpretive effects influence societal conflicts and thereby strengthen (or weaken) democracy. While the article focuses on hypothesis-generation rather than hypothesis-testing, it draws on a large variety of policy and case examples to corroborate and illustrate the theoretical expectations embodied in the framework. Insights into policy’s role in democratic conflict management expand our understanding of the challenges to democracy in the twenty-first century and create new possibilities for comparative, policy-focused research into what makes democracy work.

本文通过承认政策在其中发挥越来越重要的作用，提出重新思考民主冲突管理。随着关于民主健康的辩论愈演愈烈，关于民主国家如何管理和吸收政治和社会冲突的研究变得广泛相关。现有的理论和观点通过选举和其他制度机制的视角来看待冲突管理，或者他们检查了成功管理冲突的社会和经济先决条件，但对政策如何促进冲突管理的理解不足。本文建立了一个理论框架，可以分析政策的物质和解释效果如何影响社会冲突，从而加强（或削弱）民主。虽然本文侧重于假设生成而不是假设检验，但它借鉴了大量的政策和案例来证实和说明框架中体现的理论期望。对政策在民主冲突管理中的作用的洞察扩大了我们对 21 世纪民主面临的挑战的理解，并为比较、以政策为重点的研究民主运作的原因创造了新的可能性。