The Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies: An Introduction

What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue "Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies" surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism's long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis

Civil war violence and political trust: microlevel evidence from Nepal

Exposure to violence can shape people’s political and social perceptions. War-time effects on trust in state institutions are particularly relevant for political stability in the aftermath of violent conflict. If people distrust the state, they are less likely to endorse reform plans, will be less inclined to comply with state rules and regulations, and may uphold support for challengers of state authority. Our paper contributes to the understanding of the role of violence for trust in the national government. We use high-quality, geo-referenced survey data, joined with village-level information on civil war casualties, to estimate the effects of exposure to violence on political trust in Nepal. We find that exposure to violence matters for reducing trust in the national government. This association seems to be mainly driven by effects of violence at the outbreak of the conflict as well as at the end of the civil war period under investigation. These findings shed new light on the complex associations between exposure to violence and political trust

The Territorial Expansion of the Colonial State: Evidence from German East Africa 1890-1909

What explains states' sub-national territorial reach? While large parts of the state-building literature have focused on national capabilities, little is known about the determinants of the unevenness of state presence at the sub-national level. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at early attempts at state building: it investigates the processes of state penetration in the former colony of German East Africa. Contrary to previous studies - which largely emphasized antecedent or structural factors - the current study argues that geographical patterns of state penetration have been driven by the state's strategic imperative to solidify control over territory and establish political stability. The article tests these propositions using an original, geo-referenced grid-cell dataset for the years 1890 to 1909 based on extensive historical records in German colonial yearbooks and maps

Technology and collective action: the effect of cell phone coverage on political violence in Africa

The spread of cell phone technology across Africa has transforming effects on the economic and political sphere of the continent. In this paper, we investigate the impact of cell phone technology on violent collective action. We contend that the availability of cell phones as a communication technology allows political groups to overcome collective action problems more easily and improve in-group cooperation, and coordination. Utilizing novel, spatially disaggregated data on cell phone coverage and the location of organized violent events in Africa, we are able to show that the availability of cell phone coverage significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict. Our findings hold across numerous different model specifications and robustness checks, including cross-sectional models, instrumental variable techniques, and panel data method

Indigenous identity, natural resources, and contentious politics in Bolivia: a disaggregated conflict analysis; 2000-2011

How do natural resources and ethnic identity interact to incite or to mitigate social conflict? This article argues that high-value natural resources can act as an important catalyst for the politicization of ethnic, specifically indigenous identity, and contribute to social conflict as they limit the malleability of identity frames and raise the stakes of confrontations. We test this argument using unique subnational data from Bolivian provinces. Drawing on Bolivian newspaper reports, we code conflict events for all of the 112 provinces from 2000 to 2011. We join this conflict data with information on local ethnic composition from the census, the political representation of ethnic groups at the national level, as well as geo-spatial information on gas deposits. Using time-series cross-sectional count models, we show a significant conflict-promoting effect of the share of indigenous people in provinces with gas reserves, but not without

A re-assessment of reporting bias in event-based violence data with respect to cell phone coverage

This paper discusses the issue of possible reporting bias in media-based violent-event data and its relation to the role of communication technology in fostering collective action. We expand the work of Weidmann (2016), presenting several sensitivity analyses to determine the degree to which reporting bias may confound the relationship between communication technology and violence in a recent study that relies on event data for Africa. We find no strong evidence that suggests results on the positive relationship between communication technology and collective action in the study by Pierskalla and Hollenbach (2013) are wholly an artifact of reporting bias

Manpower to coerce and co-opt : State capacity and political violence in southern Sudan 2006-2010

This paper investigates the role of state capacity for political violence. Most previous studies have suffered from inadequacies of country-level data, questionable validity of indicators or theoretical shortcomings. This paper aims at overcoming some of these challenges. We focus on one specific aspect of state capacity: the role of governmental manpower. We argue that its subnational effect on political violence follows a non-linear, inverted-U shape. We investigate this hypothesis in the context of southern Sudan, covering the period from 2006 to 2010. We use unique data on the geographical distribution of public personnel across 75 southern Sudanese counties. The data are matched with geocoded data on violent events as well as various socio-economic indicators. Our fixed-effects estimations indicate that particularly low or high levels of state capacity are associated with low levels of violence. Counties with intermediate numbers of state personnel experience the highest numbers of violent events.publishe

Replication Data for: A Re-Assessment of Reporting Bias in Event-Based Violence Data with Respect to Cell Phone Coverage

This paper discusses the issue of possible reporting bias in media based violent event data and its relation to the role of communication technology in fostering collective action. We expand the work of Weidmann (2015), presenting several sensitivity analyses to determine the degree to which reporting bias may confound the relationship between communication technology and violence in a recent study that relies on UCDP-GED event data for Africa (Pierskalla & Hollenbach 2013). We find no strong evidence that suggests results on the positive relationship between communication technology and collective action in the study by Pierskalla and Hollenbach (2013) is wholly an artifact of reporting bia

The Partial Effectiveness of Indoctrination in Autocracies: Evidence from the German Democratic Republic

Abstract Dictators depend on a committed bureaucracy to implement their policy preferences. But how do they induce loyalty and effort within their civil service? The authors study indoctrination through forced military service as a cost-effective strategy for achieving this goal. Conscription allows the regime to expose recruits, including future civil servants, to intense “political training” in a controlled environment, which should improve system engagement. To test this hypothesis, the authors analyze archival data on over 370,000 cadres from the former German Democratic Republic. Exploiting the introduction of mandatory service in the gdr in 1962 for causal identification, they find a positive effect of conscription on bureaucrats’ system engagement. Additional analyses indicate that this effect likely did not result from deep norm internalization. Findings are more compatible with the idea that political training familiarized recruits with elite preferences, allowing them to behave strategically in accordance with the rules of the game