Disarming Fears of Diversity: Ethnic Heterogeneity and State Militarization, 1988—2002

Abstract

This study investigates whether ethnic and other forms of social diversity affect militarization of society. Recent scholarship in economics finds that high diversity leads to lower provision of public goods. At the same time, many conflict studies find that highly diverse societies face a lower risk of civil war, as opposed to relatively more homogenous populations. The authors explore whether diversity prompts governments to militarize heavily in order to prevent armed conflict, which would then crowd out spending on other public goods in a `guns versus butter' trade-off. Thus, `preventive militarization' would explain both outcomes. Yet the authors find the opposite: higher levels of ethnic diversity predict lower levels of militarization. If high diversity lowers the hazard of civil war, as many find, then it does not happen via preventive militarization. If diverse societies spend less on public goods, then this is not because they are crowded out by security spending. The results support those who suggest that diversity may, in fact, pose a lower security threat to states, since it is highly likely that states facing potential social strife would prioritize state militarization.

Does Ethnolinguistic Diversity Preclude Good Governance? A Comparative Study with Alternative Data, 1990‐2015

“…Using Alesina's measure of fractionalization, we find a positive effect of higher fractionalization on respect for physical integrity, controlling for electoral democracy, per capita income, population size, and civil war. These results corroborate the findings of others that have used other forms of human rights data (de Soysa and Neumayer ; Lee et al ; Walker and Poe ). Thus, it does not seem that high diversity generates the frictions that might lead to “physical violence” against civilians by state agents.…”

International migration, foreign direct investment, and development stage in developing economies

“…Developed countries adopt their immigration policies to mitigate the negative effects of immigration, including the labor substitutes of their natives and the allocation of their social welfare system. Among various policies, most of them tend to provide favorable conditions only to highly skilled labor immigrants to improve their economic conditions but also may increase restrictions on low-skilled labor immigrants (De Soysa & Neumayer, 2008;LaLonde & Topel, 1997;Montalvo & Reynal-Querol, 2005). Regarding emigration policies, most countries do not restrict their emigration except for some politically exceptional countries or nondemocratic countries.…”

Enter The Dragon! An Empirical Analysis of Chinese versus US Arms Transfers to Autocrats and Violators of Human Rights, 1989-20061

“…Secondly, we control for whether or not a civil war exists. Countries with civil wars have a higher demand for arms (De Soysa and Neumayer 2008), and possibly occur among countries that are neither fully democratic, nor fully autocratic (Hegre, Ellingsen, Gates, and Gleditsch 2001), but the level of domestic violence should be accounted for. We use the UCDP‐PRIO armed conflicts data that measure a civil war as a conflict involving a rebel group against a government where at least 25 battle‐related deaths have occurred in a single year (Gleditsch, Wallensteen, Eriksson, Sollenberg, and Strand 2002).…”