Of rulers, rebels, and revenue: State capacity, civil war onset, and primary commodities

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between civil war onset and state capacity through a focus on the role of primary commodities. This is accomplished by moving the focus of the civil war literature away from an almost exclusive concern with the incentives of rebels to a consideration of both rebels and rulers as revenue seeking predators. This predatory theory approach expects that higher levels of state capacity should deter civil war onset, while civil war onset should reduce state capacity. Further, natural resource rents are expected to enhance state capacity, rather than increase the likelihood of civil war onset. In order to deal with the endogeneity posed by including fiscal measures of state capacity in single equation models of civil war onset, this study employs a simultaneous equations framework. This framework allows us to capture the effects of civil war onset on state capacity and vice versa, as well as the effects of primary commodities on both endogenous covariates. The main findings from the statistical analyses include: state capacity does not affect civil war onset, but civil war onset reduces state capacity; and primary products directly affect only state capacity -they do not directly affect civil war onset, as found in previous contributions to the literature.

The Spatial Dimensions of State Fiscal Capacity The Mechanisms of International Influence on Domestic Extractive Efforts

“…Unfortunately, this data is just not available for most countries. The total tax take represented by the tax ratio is often the only available measure, and has become the standard in the predatory theory literature (Campbell 1993;Cheibub 1998;Thies 2005Thies , 2010 6 We treat a state as democratic if it has a score of 7 or greater on the Polity2 variable of the Polity IV dataset. To separate democracies into presidential or parliamentary, we rely on Banks' measure of whether a president or member of the legislature operates as the head of government.…”

“…The former two measures are thought to increase state revenues since they reduce transaction costs, while the latter two measures should reduce revenues since they increase transaction costs (Cheibub, 1998). However, other factors, such as religious and ethnic fractionalization also implicate transaction costs, since extraction from homogeneous societies is presumed to be simpler than heterogeneous ones (Thies 2010). In fact, many of the factors discussed as relating to bargaining power (above) and discount rates (see below) also implicate transaction costs.…”

Oil, Natural Gas, and Intrastate Conflict: Does Ownership Matter?

“…Second, resource production may create economic and social grievances resulting from resource-related terms-of-trade shocks, currency appreciations, and increasing inequalities (Ross 2003(Ross , 2004(Ross , 2012. In recent years, the resource-conflict link has increasingly been questioned (see Brunnschweiler and Bulte 2009;Thies 2010). Authors stress the 2 For an overview of the possible mechanisms driving the relationship between natural resources and civil war onset, see Humphreys (2005), Ross (2004Ross ( , 2006, and Le Billon (2008).…”

“…Some studies maintain that previous findings linking resources to domestic conflict may be a product of spurious correlation. Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) and Thies (2010), for example, find no direct link between these two variables.…”

“…As outlined in the literature review, Thies (2010) unites the civil war and state building literatures by employing the predictions from predatory theory. The author stresses that governments are the main beneficiaries of natural resource revenue even in the presence of rebels as revenue seeking predators and finds that natural resources may in fact enhance the capacity of the state.…”