Rulers
HIV/AIDS, Life Expectancy, and the Opportunity Cost Model of Civil War
Tyler Kustra
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article views death in battle as an opportunity cost whose size is determined by the number of years a rebel would have lived as a civilian. As civilian life expectancy declines, this opportunity cost does too, increasing the probability of rebellion. This theory is tested with a tragic natural experiment: the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Using male circumcision rates as an instrument for life expectancy, the analysis shows that a one-year increase in life expectancy decreases the probability of civil war by 2.6 percentage points. This supports the theory that opportunity costs are important determinants of conflict onset and that nonpecuniary opportunity costs should be taken into account. This article concludes by noting that cost–benefit analyses of public health interventions should include decreases in the probability of civil war, and the attendant benefits in terms of lives saved and material damage prevented, in their calculations.
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Institutionally Constrained Technology Adoption: Resolving the Longbow Puzzle
Douglas Allen & Peter Leeson
Journal of Law and Economics, August 2015, Pages 683-715
Abstract:
For over a century the longbow reigned as undisputed king of medieval European missile weapons. Yet only England used the longbow as a mainstay in its military arsenal; France and Scotland clung to the technologically inferior crossbow. This longbow puzzle has perplexed historians for decades. We resolve it by developing a theory of institutionally constrained technology adoption. Unlike the crossbow, the longbow was cheap and easy to make and required rulers who adopted the weapon to train large numbers of citizens in its use. These features enabled usurping nobles whose rulers adopted the longbow to potentially organize effective rebellions against them. Rulers choosing between missile technologies thus confronted a trade-off with respect to internal and external security. England alone in late medieval Europe was sufficiently politically stable to allow its rulers the first-best technology option. In France and Scotland political instability prevailed, constraining rulers in these nations to the crossbow.
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Oeindrila Dube & S.P. Harish
NYU Working Paper, October 2015
Abstract:
A large scholarship claims that states led by women are less conflictual than states led by men. However, it is theoretically unclear why female leaders would favor more conciliatory war policies. And, it is empirically challenging to identify the effect of female rule, since women may gain power disproportionately during periods of peace. We surmount this challenge by exploiting features of hereditary succession in European polities over the 15th-20th centuries. In this context, women were more likely to acquire power if the previous monarch lacked a male first-born child, or had a sister who could follow as successor. Using these factors as instruments for female rule, we find that queenly reigns participated more in inter-state conflicts, without experiencing more internal conflict. Moreover, the tendency of queens to participate as conflict aggressors varied based on marital status. Among married monarchs, queens were more likely to participate as attackers than kings. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were more likely to be attacked than kings. These results are consistent with an account in which queens relied on their spouses to manage state affairs, enabling them to pursue more aggressive war policies. Kings, on the other hand, were less inclined to utilize a similar division of labor. This asymmetry in how queens relied on male spouses and kings relied on female spouses strengthened the relative capacity of queenly reigns, facilitating their greater participation in warfare.
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Marc Hutchison, Salvatore Schiano & Jenifer Whitten-Woodring
International Journal of Press/Politics, April 2016, Pages 165-187
Abstract:
Media freedom is typically viewed as crucial to democracy and development. The idea is that independent news media will facilitate free and fair elections and shine a spotlight on corruption — thereby serving as a fourth estate. Yet political leaders often justify restricting media freedom on the grounds that irresponsible news coverage will incite political violence — potentially undermining government and in effect acting as a fifth column. So is media freedom a force for democracy or a source of civil conflict? We hypothesize that the effect of media freedom on civil conflict is conditioned by a country’s level of intolerance. Specifically, we predict when social intolerance is low, media freedom will discourage domestic conflict because the tone of the news coverage will reflect the level of tolerance and ameliorate any inflammatory coverage. In contrast, we predict that high levels of social intolerance will fuel and be fueled by inflammatory news coverage if the media are free, thereby promoting civil conflict. We test our hypotheses across countries and over time drawing from World Values and European Values Surveys and the Global Media Freedom Dataset and find that the combination of media freedom and high social intolerance is associated with increased civil conflict.
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Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression
Daniel Carpenter
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do petitions flourish when they are often denied if not ignored by the sovereigns who receive them? When activists seek to build political organizations in network-rich but information-poor environments, petitioning as institutional technology facilitates recruitment. A petition’s signatory list identifies and locates individuals sympathetic to its prayer and expresses to other citizens who and how many agree with the prayer. Three historical moments – the explosion of antislavery petitioning in the antebellum United States, the emergence of Protestantism in sixteenth-century France, and England’s suppression of petitioning after the Restoration Settlement of 1660 – provide vivid demonstrations of the theory. A recruitment-based theory implies that petition drives mobilize as much as they express, that well-established groups and parties petition less frequently, and that the most important readers of a petition are those asked to sign it. Contemporary digital petitioning both routinizes and takes its force from the petition’s embedded recruitment technology.
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Causal Effect of Witnessing Political Protest on Civic Engagement
Han Zhang
Princeton University Working Paper, February 2016
Abstract:
How does physically witnessing a protest in a democratic society affect citizens in authoritarian societies? Existing methods are unable to answer this question because of their difficulty in capturing witnesses, constructing meaningful comparison groups, and obtaining information on pre-protest political behaviors. Using a quasi-experiment design, I report a first causal estimation of the impact of 13 protests in Hong Kong from 2012-14 on witnesses from mainland China. I used geocoded posts from Chinese social networking site to construct a panel of Chinese users who had visited Hong Kong at different timing: treated users were physically close to one of the protests when it occurred while control users already left Hong Kong before the protests occurred and therefore could not witness them. I used difference-in-differences methods to estimate changes of intensities of and issues of discussion of civic and political problems. The treated users published 40.39% more posts that discuss civic and political problems after protest, relative to the change of the control users. This increase is robust under several replication and placebo tests, and remains significant within three months after the protests. Treated users discussed more issues that are related to their daily lives such as pollution, food safety. They also discussed more about democracy but mainly in the context of Hong Kong instead of treating it as a topic for China proper, and expressed mixed feelings about democracy. The results suggest that witnessing protests driven by democratic claims lead citizens from authoritarian regimes to be more civically engaged.
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Cole Harvey
Electoral Studies, March 2016, Pages 105–117
Abstract:
Vote-buying and voter intimidation are costly, complicated, and risky ways to manage elections. Why, then, do hybrid regimes utilize such tactics rather than ballot stuffing or election falsification? Such methods to mobilize voters require the construction of patronage networks that can be used to mobilize or demobilize clients beyond the election, and to display the incumbent's organizational strength. These networks are most valuable in places where opposition groups are active; consequently direct voter pressure should be more common in competitive areas. This paper uses data from Russia's 83 regions during the 2011 election to compare patterns of extra-legal mobilization with patterns of ballot stuffing and falsification. I conclude that local political competitiveness structures the mix of electoral manipulation tactics employed.
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Institutions, information, and commitment: The role of democracy in conflict
James Bang & Aniruddha Mitra
Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper explores the hypothesis that both the preexisting quality of democracy in a polity at the onset of conflict and the quality of democracy expected to emerge in the aftermath influence the likelihood of civil war. An empirical investigation of the hypothesis presents a challenge due to concerns of endogeneity and selection: the post-conflict level of democracy is endogenous to the pre-conflict level. Further, for a given time period, either a number of countries have not experienced civil war; or if they did, did not resolve the conflict. We overcome this selection bias by implementing a three-step extension to the Heckman procedure using an unbalanced cross-country panel of 77 countries over the period 1971–2005. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that a standard deviation improvement in the existing level of democracy reduces the probability of civil war by approximately 9 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in expected post-conflict democratization increases the probability of conflict by approximately 48 percentage points.
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Does poverty cause conflict? Isolating the causal origins of the conflict trap
Alex Braithwaite, Niheer Dasandi & David Hudson
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2016, Pages 45-66
Abstract:
Does poverty cause civil conflict? A considerable literature seeks to answer this question, yet concerns about reverse causality threaten the validity of extant conclusions. To estimate the impact of poverty on conflict and to determine whether the relationship between them is causal, it is necessary to identify a source of exogenous variation in poverty. We do this by introducing a robust instrument for poverty: a time-varying measure of international inequalities. We draw upon existing theories about the structural position of a country in the international economic network — specifically, the expectation that countries in the core tend to be wealthier and those on the periphery struggle to develop. This instrument is plausibly exogenous and satisfies the exclusion restriction, which suggests that it affects conflict only through its influence upon poverty. Instrumental variables probit regression is employed to demonstrate that the impact of poverty upon conflict appears to be causal.
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Curtis Bell
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explains coup activity in democracies by adapting insights from the literature on commitment problems and framing coup around the threats leaders and potential coup plotters pose to each other. I claim democratic constraints on executive power inhibit a leader’s ability to repress threats from political rivals. Though this decreases motivations for coup attempts, it also makes democracies more vulnerable should a coup attempt occur. Consequently, democratic constraints on executive power do not reduce the frequency of coup attempts, but coups attempted against democracies are much more likely to succeed. Using several data sets of coup activity and democratic constraints, I find significant differences in coup activity in democracies and non-democracies. Relative to civilian non-democracies, democracies are about half as likely to use coup-related repression, but they face a similar frequency of coup attempts. Plots against democracies are nearly twice as likely to succeed.
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Attitudinal Differences within the Cultural Revolution Cohort: Effects of the Sent-down Experience
Robert Harmel & Yao-Yuan Yeh
China Quarterly, March 2016, Pages 234-252
Abstract:
This study addresses whether individuals who were sent down during the Cultural Revolution reveal different political attitudes from those who were socialized during the same period but were not themselves sent down. Using data from the urban sample of the 2006 General Social Survey of China, the authors find evidence that formerly sent-down youth – and particularly sent-down women – as compared to their not-sent-down peers, are today more willing to accept the class-struggle foundation of Mao's communist ideology but are, at the same time, more willing to assess the performance and structure of the communist regime critically.
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Naming, Shaming, and International Sporting Events: Does the Host Nation Play Fair?
Zack Bowersox
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recently, the Winter Olympic Games in Russia and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in Brazil have drawn attention as much for politics as the excitement of the competitions. Russia’s pursuance of discriminatory homosexual policies made it the target of international rights groups; Brazil’s exploitation of the poor for the sake of hosting the World Cup led to several high-profile protests ahead of the event. These large-scale international sporting competitions provide a ready-made platform for naming and shaming states that may have dubious human rights records. The question remains as to whether or not the shaming of these host states by international groups effectively changes a state’s behavior. This paper argues that states facing increased global media attention while hosting an event are likely to substitute repression of physical integrity rights with repression of civil and political rights in an effort to maintain favorable appearances internationally. However, I find support for both physical and expressive rights improving in states when shaming is conditioned on the selection to host an international sporting event.
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Natural Disasters and the Size of Nations
Muhammet Bas & Elena McLean
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
What is the relationship between natural disasters and country size? Is an increasing likelihood of environmental shocks linked to political integration or secessionism? We argue that natural disasters are associated with a decline in country size. This relationship arises because costs generated by disasters are higher for citizens located farther away from the political center of a country and costs are amplified as disasters affect a larger area in a country, which in turn makes it less desirable for citizens in remote regions to remain part of a larger country. Our empirical results show that greater risks of environmental shocks are indeed associated with smaller countries, and conflict likely serves as a key mechanism in this process.
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Youth bulge and civil war: Why a country’s share of young adults explains only non-ethnic wars
Omer Yair & Dan Miodownik
Conflict Management and Peace Science, February 2016, Pages 25-44
Abstract:
Scholars agree that young men carry out most acts of political violence. Still, there is no consensus on the link between relatively large youth cohorts and the onset of violent, armed intra-state conflicts. In this paper, we examine the effect of youth bulge, a measure of the relative abundance of youth in a country, on the onset of two different types of civil wars — ethnic and non-ethnic wars. Building on and extending three datasets used by other scholars, we theoretically argue and empirically substantiate that, as a result of the negative effects of youth bulge on the economic conditions of the youth cohorts in the country, youth bulge affects the onset of non-ethnic wars, but not the onset of ethnic wars. Possible implications and directions for further research are then suggested.
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Fuel to the Fire: Natural Disasters and the Duration of Civil Conflict
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do natural disasters prolong civil conflict? Or are disasters more likely to encourage peace as hostilities diminish when confronting shared hardship or as shifts in the balance of power between insurgents and the state hasten cessation? To address these questions, this study performs an event history analysis of disasters’ impact on the duration of 224 armed intrastate conflicts occurring in 86 states between 1946 and 2005. I contend that natural disasters increase conflict duration by decreasing the state’s capacity to suppress insurgency, while reinforcing insurgent groups’ ability to evade capture and avoid defeat. First, disasters’ economic impact coupled with state financial outlays for disaster relief and reconstruction, reduce resources available for counterinsurgency and nation building in conflict zones. Second, the military’s role in administering humanitarian assistance can reduce the availability of troops and military hardware for counterinsurgency, prompt temporary ceasefires with insurgents, or both. Third, natural disasters can cause infrastructural damages that disproportionately hinder the state’s capacity to execute counterinsurgency missions, thereby making insurgent forces more difficult to capture and overcome. The combination of these dynamics should encourage longer conflicts in states with higher incidence of disaster. Empirical evidence strongly supports this contention, indicating that states with greater disaster vulnerability fight longer wars.
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The Risk of Civil Conflicts as a Determinant of Political Institutions
Alvaro Aguirre
European Journal of Political Economy, March 2016, Pages 36–59
Abstract:
This paper proposes a mechanism to explain differences in political institutions based on a particular feature of civil conflicts that has not been previously explored. Under asymmetric and uncertain costs of civil conflicts members of the elite would like to commit in advance to a strong response to insurgencies, but ex-post they have the incentives to block any response if the conflict mainly affects other members of the elite. One way of solving this commitment problem is empowering the executive so he may react forcefully to conflicts, despite the opposition of some fraction of the elite. The main prediction is that, conditional on asymmetric and uncertain costs, the higher is the likelihood of a conflict in the future, the lower are the constraints imposed on the executive. The paper validates this implication using a sample of former colonies and geographic variables to identify the exogenous component of the likelihood of conflicts.
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Terrorism and spatial disparities: Does interregional inequality matter?
Roberto Ezcurra & David Palacios
European Journal of Political Economy, March 2016, Pages 60–74
Abstract:
This article examines the relationship between interregional inequality and the incidence of domestic terrorism in a panel of 48 countries over the period 1990–2010. The results show that a high level of interregional inequality increases the number of domestic terror events in the sample countries. This finding is robust to the inclusion of additional explanatory variables that may affect both interregional inequality and domestic terrorism. Furthermore, the observed link between interregional inequality and terrorist activity does not depend on the choice of the specific measure used to quantify the degree of dispersion in the regional distribution of GDP per capita within the sample countries.