Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

Abstract

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and civil war empirically have almost invariably relied upon measures of democracy to proxy for the hypothesized mechanisms, most notably the argument that the opposing effects of political accommodation and repression will give rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war. The authors detail a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures and develop alternative measures based on the likely risks that political leaders will lose power in irregular challenges and their implications for the incentives for resort to violence. The authors evaluate empirically how the security with which leaders hold office influences the prospects of violent civil conflict. The findings indicate that recent irregular leader entry and transitions indeed increase the risk of conflict onset, while democratic institutions are found to decrease the risk of civil war, after controlling for the new measures of state weakness.

Auxiliary Force Structure: Paramilitary Forces and Progovernment Militias

“…Similar to other findings, it is then not the case that PGMs are only a security type that can be found in autocratic regimes, but exist across all different forms of government (Carey, Colaresi and Mitchell, 2015; Vreeland, 2008). Similarly, Gleditsch and Ruggeri (2010) outline a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures (see also Hegre, 2014), and Bell (2016) andHill Jr (2016) show that focusing on disaggregated, sub-components of democracy may reveal new findings in the context of coups and human rights, respectively.…”

Democracy and armed conflict

“…Fearon & Laitin (2003: 85) interpret the inverted-U finding for internal conflicts as due not to the institutional characteristics themselves, but to an underlying conflict over the setup of the system: '''anocracies'' are weak regimes, lacking the resources to be successful autocrats or containing an unstable mix of political forces that makes them unable to move to crush nascent rebel groups'. This interpretation is supported by Gleditsch & Ruggeri (2010). Their proxy of instability (a variable recording recent irregular transitions of power) is associated with a high risk of conflict onset.…”

The shape of things to come? Expanding the inequality and grievance model for civil war forecasts with event data

“…Our measures are generally similar to those used by Buhaug et al, but we recollect a new data 8 See, e.g., Gleditsch & Ruggeri (2010) on opportunity structures and civil war onset.…”