Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence

Abstract Can revenue sharing of resource rents be a source distributive conflict? cohesive institutions avoid such conflicts? We exploit exogenous variation in local government revenues and new data on democratic Nigeria to study these questions. find strong link between conflict. Conflicts are highly organized concentrated districts time-periods with unelected governments. Once governments elected relationships much weaker. argue that elections produce more help limit distributional conflict groups. Throughout, we confirm findings using individual level survey data.