How does the presence of multiple combatants affect rebel groups’ ideological and demand positioning? Although violent forms of inter-group conflict have been widely studied in the civil war literature, rebel groups’ strategic use of ideology and demands has received scarce scholarly attention. We argue that the pressure of competition forces rebel groups to differentiate themselves ideologically and demand-wise from their rivals to maximize their chances of survival and success. Rebel groups strive to set themselves apart by offering unique products to their supporters and recruits. Thus, we contend that rebel groups are more likely to modify their ideologies and demands from the government in the face of competition from rival groups. We test this theory using novel data collected from rebel group manifestos and public statements. Our findings suggest that groups are more likely to shift their ideology and modify their demands as the number of rival groups increases.

In recent decades, political science literature has experienced significant growth in the popularity of nonlinear models with multiplicative interaction terms. When one or more constitutive variables are not binary, most studies report the marginal effect of the variable of interest at its sample mean while allowing the other constitutive variable/s to vary along its range and holding all other covariates constant at their means, modes, or medians. In this article, we argue that this conventional approach is not always the most suitable since the marginal effect of a variable at its sample mean might not be sufficiently representative of its prevalent effect at a specific value of the conditioning variable and might produce excessively model-dependent predictions. We propose two procedures to help researchers gain a better understanding of how the typical effect of the variable of interest varies as a function of the conditioning variable: (1) computing and plotting the marginal effects at all in-sample combinations of the values of the constitutive variables and (2) computing and plotting what we call the “Distribution-Weighted Average Marginal Effect” over the values of the conditioning variable.

COVID-19 pandemic necessitates taking measures that may be very costly from an economic standpoint and likely to make the mass public discontent. If an anti-pandemic regimen does not accomplish its goals, its costs become even harder to justify. We argue that, under such circumstances, cancellation of an anti-pandemic regimen would decrease the reliability of health data because rank-in-file policymakers and bureaucrats have incentives to present more optimistic statistics to signal their competence and politicians would further pressure them to report statistics that appear to agree with the cancellation of restrictions and give legitimacy to taking the measures. Our empirical analyses suggest that closeness to the restrictions' cancellation date is associated with lower reliability of COVID-19 daily cumulative cases and deaths data. Being robust to several sensitivity and robustness checks, this finding is alarming from the perspective of representative democracy and for those who have to survive in these turbulent times.

How does the presence of multiple combatants affect rebel groups' ideological positioning? Although violent forms of inter-group conflict have been widely studied in the civil war literature, rebel groups' strategic use of ideology has so far received scarce scholarly attention. We argue that the pressure of competition forces rebel groups to differentiate themselves ideologically from their rivals to maximize their chances of survival and success. Rebel groups strive to set themselves apart by offering unique ideological products to their supporters and recruits. Thus, we contend that rebel groups are more likely to modify their ideologies and demands from the government in the face of competition from rival groups. We test this theory using novel data collected from rebel group manifestos and public statements. Our findings suggest that groups are more likely to shift their ideology and modify their demands from the government as the number of rival groups increases.