The Logic of Political Violence

Political violence is an everyday occurence in many weakly institutionalized polities. This paper o¤ers a uni…ed approach for studying political violence whether it emerges as repression or civil con‡ict. We formulate a model where an incumbent or opposition can choose to use violence as a means of acquiring or maintaining power. We study the institutional and economic factors that determine the use of one-sided or two-sided violence (repression or civil war). The model gives way naturally to a hierarchy of violence from repression to civil war, which forms the basis for our empirical approach. Accordingly, we construct an ordered variable to explore the empirical determinants of violence. Two robust factors emerge from the data. First, economic shocks are robustly correlated with the use of violence. Second, the relationships are heterogeneous depending on political institutions. All our results are based on exploiting only the within-country variation in violence. This paper is a signi…cant revision and extension of an earlier paper, circulating under the title “The Incidence of Civil War: Theory and Evidence”. We are grateful to participants in seminars at the LSE, Edinburgh, Warwick, Oxford, IIES, Tilburg, UPF, Uppsala, a CIFAR meeting, ESEM 2009, and to Paul Collier, Jim Fearon, Erik Melander, Eric Neumayer, Ragnar Torvik, Jan van Ours, Ruixue Xie, and Magnus Öberg for comments; to David Seim and Prakarsh Singh for research assistance; and to CIFAR, the ESRC, and the Swedish Research Council for …nancial support.