Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and civil war empirically have almost invariably relied upon measures of democracy to proxy for the hypothesized mechanisms, most notably the argument that the opposing effects of political accommodation and repression will give rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war. The authors detail a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures and develop alternative measures based on the likely risks that political leaders will lose power in irregular challenges and their implications for the incentives for resort to violence. The authors evaluate empirically how the security with which leaders hold office influences the prospects of violent civil conflict. The findings indicate that recent irregular leader entry and transitions indeed increase the risk of conflict onset, while democratic institutions are found to decrease the risk of civil war, after controlling for the new measures of state weakness. </jats:p

Periphery versus periphery: The stakes of separatist war

This is replication data for main and supplementary tables in Periphery versus Periphery: The Stakes of Separatist War, Bethany Lacina, JOP. The data are ethnic group-year observations, based on the Ethnic Power Relations Dataset (http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/epr). The independent variables created for the JOP article are information about spatial overlap between ethnic groups and the relative political power of overlapping groups

Replication data for: How governments shape the risk of civil violence: India’s federal reorganization, 1950–56

Governments are absent from empirical studies of civil violence, except as static sources of grievance. The influence that government policy accommodations and threats of repression have on internal violence is difficult to verify without a means to identify potential militancy that did not happen. I use a within-country research design to address this problem. During India’s reorganization as a linguistic federation, every language group could have sought a state. I show that representation in the ruling party conditioned the likelihood of a violent statehood movement. Pro-statehood groups that were politically advantaged over the interests opposed to them were peacefully accommodated. Statehood movements similar in political importance to their opponents used violence. Very politically-disadvantaged groups refrained from mobilization, anticipating repression. These results call into question the search for a monotonic relationship between grievances and violence and the omission of domestic politics from prominent theories of civil conflict

Chapter 4 Replication Data

Replication data for analysis in Chapter 4 of Rival Claim

Figure 1.1 Replication Data

Replication data for Figure 1.1: Incidence of civil armed conflict over territorial autonomy and number of countries with one or more autonomous ethnic regions, 1946–201

Table 9.2 Replication Data

Replication data for Table 9.2: Regional rivalries and ethnoterritorial civil wars in cross-national perspective, 1946–200

Table 9.1 Replication Data

Replication data for Table 9.1: One-sided and nonstate violence during ethnoterritorial wars, 1989–201

Chapter 6 Replication Data

Replication data for Chapter 6 of Rival Claim