Civil conflict and three dimensions of ethnic inequality

THE ABSTRACT COULD BE REWRITTEN EMPHASIZING THE TRADITIONAL DIFFICULTIES IN FINDING A RELATION BETWEEN INEQU. AND CONFLICT AND OUR EXPLANATION FOR THAT. Most empirical studies on civil conflict are not able to find a significant relationship between interpersonal-measures of economic inequality and the likelihood of conflict. When individuals belong to groups, general inequality (measured by the Gini) can be decomposed into three components: between-group inequality (BGI), within-group inequality (WGI), and ‘Overlap’ (which is inversely related to the economic segregation of groups). This paper shows that is possible to establish a robust empirical relation between group-based measures of income differences and conflict. Drawing on over 200 individual-level surveys from 89 countries, we create a new data set that allows us to measure these three components and to examine their empirical relationship with civil conflict. Consistent with Esteban and Ray’s (2011) argument about the need for labor and capital to fight civil wars, we find a strong, robust positive association between WGI and civil conflict. And consistent with the “contact hypothesis” in sociology, we find that the economic segregation of groups (as measured by a lower Overlap component) is often associated with more civil conflict. Since some components of inequality are associated with more civil conflict but others are associated with less, the analysis helps explain why it has been difficult to identify a relationship between general inequality and civil war. And the strong finding for WGI underscores the value of developing clear theories about how the internal characteristics of groups influence the incidence of civil conflict. ⇤Department of Political Science, Columbia University, [email protected]. †Institute for Economic Analysis, Barcelona, Spain, [email protected].