This article focuses on the importance of military factionalism in a nonconsolidated democracy: the Spanish Republic (1931–9). It builds a new micro‐dataset for over 11,000 officers during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) to study how professional and economic interests created divisions within the military and influenced officers’ allegiances during the war. Results confirm that distributional conflicts influenced officers’ decisions in Republican‐controlled territories: officers who gained from military reforms in the years before the civil war and those with more rapid promotions in the months predating the war were more likely to remain loyal to the government. This article also explores the behavioural determinants of officers’ propensity to rebel and finds that hierarchy mattered, as senior officers influenced subordinates’ choices of side.

Violence within armed groups in civil wars is important and understudied. Linking literatures on civil war violence and military politics, this paper examines the conditions in which this fratricidal violence is narrowly selective or arbitrary with respect to concrete disloyal behavior. It uses a unique dataset of executions of officers on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. The paper finds that while much of the violence appeared to target those who actually tried to defect, many non-defectors were likely shot too, due most likely to a pervasive stereotype that officers in general were disloyal to the Republic. This stereotype was used as an information shortcut, and was promoted by political actors. Accordingly, unlikely defectors were likelier to be shot in locations in which less information was available about loyalties and in which political forces that were suspicious of officers as a group were locally stronger. 1 We are in immense debt to the late Carlos Engel, who generously shared his data with us. Jun Koga Sudduth also graciously made her purges data available in advance, for which we thank her. We also

One key step in the process of development is the transition from the personalistic rules and privileges that characterise developing societies to open access orders and rational–legal bureaucracies sustaining impersonal rules. This article uses a micro-data set of Spanish officers to study the politicisation of the army during the Second Republic (1931–1939) taking Franco's Africanist faction as the case study. The military reforms during 1931–1933 increased the impersonality of rules determining the promotion of officers, but executive discretionary powers persisted. The results suggest that changes in the government affected the dynamics of the army. Under conservative governments (1934–1935), Africanists were promoted more rapidly. Centre-left governments during the period of 1931–1933 did not systematically promote Africanists differently, but the revision of promotions in 1933 slowed their careers. The politicisation of the army was one of the factors contributing to the military coup that started the Spanish Civil War.

This article analyses the integration of economic history into economics using a unique dataset containing 11,143 articles written by 919 economic historians and published between 1980 and 2019 in leading journals; we also analyzed the authors’ biographical information. Using a probit regression, we find that since 1980, economic historians have increased their likelihood of publishing in Economics or Finance Journals (EFJs) by 12 points. This integration is more marked in North America than in Europe because North American economic historians are more likely to be trained in the discipline of economics. In contrast, a significant share of scholars in Europe are trained in the discipline of economic history. Network visualizations confirm these regional differences: citations to EFJs are much more central in North American scholars’ work. Our findings support Robert Margo’s claim that economic history is currently integrated into economics more often in publications in North America than in Europe.

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