Ruthless Rulers: Coalition Size and the Severity of Civil Conflict (original) (raw)

Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Negotiates Peace in Civil Wars: Does Regime Type Matter?

Journal of Global Security Studies, 2019

Previous research has shown that the outcome of a civil war is related to conflict duration: military victory by either the government or the rebels occurs early if it occurs at all, and the longer a civil war lasts, the more likely it is to end in a negotiated settlement. The models of civil war duration and outcome that have produced these findings are built on characteristics of the civil war and less on attributes of the state itself, other than where the state lies on the Polity autocracy-democracy scale. We propose that the risk of government victory versus negotiated settlement varies not only between democracies versus authoritarian regimes but across the different authoritarian regime types as identified by Geddes, Wright, and Franz. The distinguishing attributes of these regime typesdemocracy, one-party, personalist, military, monarchicalresult in variation across regime types in their ability to defeat a rebel movement, their vulnerability to being defeated by such a movement, and their willingness and ability to negotiate a peace agreement with rebel movements. Results from a series of competing risk models using the Uppsala-PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset demonstrate that how civil wars end is partly a function of the characteristics of the regime. Who Wins, Who Loses, Who Negotiates Peace in Civil Wars: Does Regime Type Matter? Research on how civil wars end has identified a number of characteristics of the civil war nation and of the conflict itself that affect whether the conflict will end in government victory, rebel victory, or a negotiated peace agreement (Mason and Fett 1996; Mason, Weingarten and Fett 1999; DeRouen and Sobek 2004; Brandt et al. 2008). Within this body of research, studies have identified discrete attributes of the regime itself that affect the duration and outcome of civil wars. Among these attributes are the quality of state institutionsi.e., whether it is a democracy,

The Bar Fight Theory of International Conflict: Regime Type, Coalition Size, and Victory

Political Science Research and Methods, 2015

Studies of regime type and war show that democracies tend to win the wars they fight, but questions remain about why this is the case. A simple, if underappreciated, explanation for democratic success is that democracies fight alongside larger and more powerful coalitions. Coalition partners bring additional material capabilities and may also provide intangible benefits to the war effort, such as increased legitimacy or confidence. Democracies may also find it less costly to join coalitions, as democratic war aims may be easier to apportion among the victors without diluting the spoils. Evaluating our hypotheses in a sample of all wars (or all militarized disputes) during the period 1816–2000, we find that democracies fight alongside larger coalitions and that states fighting alongside larger coalitions are more likely to win major contests. Coalition size subsumes most (and in some specifications all) of the direct effect of regime type on victory.

The Ties That Bind: Ethnicity, Pro-government Militia, and the Dynamics of Violence in Civil War

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019

Existing research reveals many of the ways pro-government militia (PGM) shape civil violence but overlooks how the ethno-political ties between the state and a PGM might influence these effects. We argue that co-ethnic militia (i.e., groups composed of the ruling elite’s ethnic kin) are relatively loyal irregular forces that multiply state military capacity. The greater loyalty of co-ethnic groups mitigates principal–agent problems but further polarizes ethnic communities, and as a result, co-ethnic PGMs are likely to be associated with longer and more intense civil conflict. We test this argument on a global sample of cases from 1989 to 2007 using new data capturing the ethnic ties of all PGMs. The results support our claims that co-ethnic militia are associated with more intense and longer civil conflict.

Who controls the wealth? Electoral system design and ethnic war in resource-rich countries

Electoral Studies, 2014

Both natural resource wealth and electoral system design are frequently investigated factors in the civil wars literature. So far, however, there is no well-known study which explicitly considers the interaction effect between these two factors on the risk of violent ethnic conflict. We argue that resource-rich countries with a proportional electoral system for the legislature are less prone to ethnic civil war than resource-rich countries with a majoritarian or mixed electoral system, as proportional electoral systems tend to increase the effective number of parliamentary parties and thus the number of groups who can share state control over resource wealth. We find empirical support for this argument using binary time-series-cross-section analysis covering 83 to 140 countries between 1984 and 2007.

Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do ''technologies of rebellion'' impact a war's severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civilian victimization and tend to be won by incumbents, while conventional ones are more likely to end in rebel victories. Substantively, these findings help us make sense of how civil wars are changing: they are becoming shorter, deadlier on the battlefield, and more challenging for existing governments-but also more likely to end with some kind of settlement between governments and armed opposition. Theoretically, our findings support the idea of taking into account technologies of rebellion (capturing characteristics of conflicts that tend to be visible mostly at the micro level) when studying macro-level patterns of conflicts such as the severity, duration, and outcomes of civil wars; they also point to the specific contribution of irregular war to both state building and social change.

Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Data Set

American Sociological Review, 2009

Quantitative research on civil wars has either discounted ethnicity as an explanatory factor altogether or maintained that wars are more likely in more diverse societies. This article shows that ethnicity is important, but that armed conflicts are driven by ethnic competition over state power, rather than high degrees of diversity. We identify three dimensions of this competitive dynamic and three particularly warprone ethnopolitical configurations: states that exclude large segments of the population on the basis of their ethnic background are likely to be challenged by rebellions; segmented states where power is shared between a large number of ethnic elites risk violent infighting between them; both infighting and rebellions will be more likely and take on secessionist forms in incohesive states where parts of the population have a short history of direct rule by the center and thus disidentify with the state. A new dataset covering all independent states since 1946 allows these three dimensions of ethnic politics to be measured directly.

Beyond Divide and Rule: Weak Dictators, Natural Resources and Civil Conflict

2011

We propose a model where an autocrat rules over an ethnically divided society. The dictator selects the tax rate over domestic production and the nation's natural resources to maximize his rents under the threat of a regime-switching revolution. We show that a weak ruler may let the country plunge in civil war to increase his personal rents. Inter-group fighting weakens potential opposition to the ruler, thereby allowing him to increase fiscal pressure. We show that the presence of natural resources exacerbates the incentives of the ruler to promote civil conflict for his own profit, especially if the resources are unequally distributed across ethnic groups. We validate the main predictions of the model using cross-country data over the period 1960-2007, and show that our empirical results are not likely to be driven by omitted observable determinants of civil war incidence or by unobservable country-specific heterogeneity.

Share It or Lose It? Authoritarian Power-Sharing and Regime Stability in Multi-Ethnic States.

In this paper, we examine the impact of ethnic cooptation on authoritarian stability. We argue theoretically and demonstrate empirically that the inclu- sion of elites from politically relevant ethnic groups significantly reduces the risk of authoritarian breakdown. We also show how this effect varies across different forms of regime change and type. While a prominent explanatory factor in conflict research, inter-ethnic competition for state power has so far been understudied within the literature on authoritarian regime survival. Although accounts of cooptation strategies have recently gained prominence, most remain structuralist and focus on formal institutions such as authori- tarian parties, parliaments and elections that facilitate cooperation between a dictator and coopted elites. We go beyond institutionalist analyses and shift the attention to the identity of those who need to be coopted, the degree to which cooptation is actually achieved and the contexts in which cooptation works best. We present three main findings: 1.) Ethnic cooptation stabilizes authoritarian regimes. 2.) It reduces the risk of irregular but not of regular forms of regime change. 3.) It is most effective where formal institutions are weak, namely in personalist dictatorships.

Which Institutions Matter? Re-Considering the Democratic Civil Peace*

International Studies Quarterly

Despite decades of research, there is no consensus on the relationship between democratic institutions and risk of civil war. We alleviate measurement issues and theoretical ambiguity in much existing work by theoretically and empirically unpacking core features of democracy and their relationship to civil war. We distinguish between institutions that impose vertical constraints on leaders from the population at large, and institutions that allow various groups, including non-incumbent elites, to place horizontal constraints on leader behavior. Both types of democratic institutions, we argue, help leaders overcome commitment problems related to potential agents of rebellion, thus reducing civil war risk. This is particularly so when these institutional mechanisms reinforce each other. Using precise institutional indicators from Varieties of Democracy, we disentangle and separately measure the dimensions of interest. Both vertical and (especially) horizontal constraints mitigate civi...