Essays on the political economy of conflict

Abstract

In early anarchic states of society, the distribution of resources was determined primarily by private capacity for violence. Increasingly, sophisticated political systems have attempted to consolidate this capacity in the hands of the state as an enforcer of rights to resources. Nevertheless, even in modern democracies, private resources continue to be used in attempts to control the state and influence distribution. This thesis explores some of the tensions between violence and democratic process in several settings: resource contests, elections and intra-state conflicts.

A participatory state is a pre-commitment by rational individuals to avoid conflict by mutually contributing towards an impartial peacekeeper. In the first essay (Chapter 2), I use a laboratory experiment to test the propensity to make costly investments in an institution for mutual conflict-avoidance in a rent-seeking game. I find that this specific institution induces agents to reduce conflict effort compared to when the institution is unavailable. This result is robust to egalitarian and unequal distributions of endowments.

In the second and third essays (Chapters 3 and 4), I empirically investigate the roles of pre-election and post-election violence in the political economy of African national-level elections. Using an instrument variable regression model, I find a positive partial effect of pre-election violence on voter support for incumbent. I also find that the incidence of post-election violence drops when incumbent is re-elected. The partial effect of the incumbent’s margin of victory on post-election violence is negative in linear and Poisson regressions, and the local average effect of the incumbent’s victory is negative in a regression-discontinuity setting.

In the fourth essay (Chapter 5), I focus on the salience of ethnic fractionalisation and polarisation in explaining the severity of intra-state conflicts. Three levels of conflict severity are modelled using a generalised ordered response model, simultaneously estimating parameters for each threshold of conflict severity. I find that polarisation, fractionalisation, and income inequality are respectively associated with minor, moderate and major conflict. In effect, the salience of polarisation and fractionalisation is found to be dependent on the severity of conflict.