Civil conflict and state failure has often been linked to breakdowns in regime legitimacy. Trust in government is a critical element of regime legitimacy and the state's ability to mediate between the demands of competing groups within society. We contend that government capability is a primary factor in shaping individuals' ascription of legitimacy to the state. Capable governments foster perceptions of legitimacy while poor institutional performance decreases the degree to which individuals trust their government. While some tests of this relationship exist in extant literature, much of the work fails to integrate both micro-and macro-level factors, is confined to regions with established state performance, or is based on single-country studies. Our approach avoids many of these deficiencies by using 32 Afrobarometer surveys collected across 16 different countries from 2000 to 2005 and employing hierarchical linear models to estimate the effects of temporal-specific, state-level variables on levels of individual trust. We find that higher institutional capacity is associated with increased levels of individual trust in government across African countries. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this effect on political trust is independent of other individual-level attitudes, socio-economic characteristics, and a state's prior internal conflicts.

The Steps-to-War theory of international conflict argues that territorial issues are more salient than other issues domestically. However, the evidence for this conclusion almost always rests with international conflict outcomes, assuming away the domestic political processes leading to greater salience. In the tolerance literature, several studies note that political attitudes, particularly toward unpopular groups, vary systematically across different states but provide few explanations that account for these differences. We believe these two observations are linked and argue that territorial threats serve as one factor conditioning individual political attitudes that privilege national unity over freedom of expression. Using World Values Survey data collected from 33 countries, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques, our paper confirms this. We find evidence that the type of external threat facing a country matters in moderating individual attitudes, even after controlling for economic and institutional differences across the states sampled. Specifically, we demonstrate how the diffusion from territorial threats to domestic audiences results in a chilling effect on individual willingness to extend democratic freedoms. Thus, we show that territorial issues exhibit greater salience domestically than other types of international issues.

How do persistent terrorist attacks influence political tolerance, a willingness to extend basic liberties to one's enemies? Studies in the U.S. and elsewhere have produced a number of valuable insights into how citizens respond to singular, massive attacks like 9/11. But they are less useful for evaluating how chronic and persistent terrorist attacks erode support for democratic values over the long haul. Our study focuses on political tolerance levels in Israel across a turbulent 30-year period, from 1980 to 2011, which allows us to distinguish the short-term impact of hundreds of terrorist attacks from the long-term influence of democratic longevity on political tolerance. We find that the corrosive influence of terrorism on political tolerance is much more powerful among Israelis who identify with the Right, who have also become much more sensitive to terrorism over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for other democracies under threat from terrorism.

This article provides some of the first individual-level evidence for the domestic salience of territorial issues. Using survey data from more than 80,000 individual respondents in 43 separate countries, we examine how conflict affects the content of individual self-identification. We find that international conflict exerts a strong influence on the likelihood and content of individual self-identification, but this effect varies with the type of conflict. Confirming nationalist theories of territorial salience, territorial conflict leads the majority of individuals in targeted countries to identify themselves as citizens of their country. However, individuals in countries that are initiating territorial disputes are more likely to self-identify as members of a particular ethnicity, which provides support for theories connecting domestic salience to ethnic politics. That conflict has variegated effects on identity formation suggests the relationship is not endogenous. Our within-case analysis of changes in Nigerian self-identifications further demonstrates that individuals are quite susceptible to the types and locations of international conflict.

This article revisits the arms race to war relationship with the hope of resolving a lingering debate in international relations over the effects of arms races. Previous empirical studies in this area suffered from a possible selection effect, rendering them unable to differentiate between the escalatory and deterrent effects of arms races. Specifically, earlier quantitative investigations were unable to test deterrence hypotheses, because the unit of analysis (dispute) presupposed that deterrence had already failed in preventing dispute onset. In order to take the possibility of deterrence seriously, a dataset is constructed that identifies arms races independently of dispute occurrence. This article improves on previous studies in that a measure of interdependent arming exogenous to dispute initiation allows for a test of whether arms races actually deter the onset of militarized disputes or contribute to dispute escalation. Both the deterrence and escalation hypotheses are tested using a sample of ‘strategic rivals’ from 1816 to 1993. The analyses reveal that arms races increase the likelihood of disputes and war. Furthermore, to account for the possibility that the arms race to war relationship may be spurious to dyadic hostilities accounting for both arms races and war, a selection model is employed that differentiates between dispute and war processes. This indicates that arms races do not contribute to deterrence and are instead associated with both disputes and war.