Maldistribution of land in agrarian societies is commonly thought to be an important precondition of mass political violence and revolution. Others argue that because of the difficulty of mobilizing rural populations for political protest, land maldistribution is irrelevant except as part of an inegalitarian distribution of income nationwide. These rival inequality hypotheses have significant implications with respect to the kinds of reforms likely to reduce the potential for insurgency in a society. They are tested using the most comprehensive cross-national compilation of data currently available on land inequality, landlessness, and income inequality. Support is found for the argument that attributes the greater causal import to income inequality. Moreover, the effect of income inequality on political violence is found to hold in the context of a causal model that takes into account the repressiveness of the regime, governmental acts of coercion, intensity of separatism, and level of economic development.

We propose two models to explain why individuals participate in collective political action—a personal influence model and a collective rationality model. Each model overcomes the free-rider problem posed by conventional rational choice theory and left unresolved in previous research. The models are tested for legal and illegal protest behaviors, using data from a national sample and two samples of protest-prone communities in the Federal Republic of Germany. The personal influence model is supported for both forms of participation, while the collective rationality model is supported for legal protest. We discuss implications of the results for grievance and rational choice theories of collective political action.

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Eski çağlardan beri siyasal Ģiddetin temel nedeninin gelir eĢitsizliği olduğu ileri sürülmüĢtür. Bazı çalıĢmalar gelir eĢitsizliği ve siyasal Ģiddet arasında hiçbir iliĢkinin olmadığını belirtirken, bazıları ekonomik geliĢme seviyesinin siyasal Ģiddetin daha güçlü bir belirleyicisi olduğunu savunmuĢlardır. Göreceli yoksunluk tartıĢmaları ise yoksunluğun, uyarılmıĢ hoĢnutsuzluğun ve kolektif siyasal Ģiddetin çeĢitli türleri arasında direk bir iliĢki olduğunu savunurken kaynak seferberliği akımı; hoĢnutsuzluk ve siyasal Ģiddet arasındaki direk bir iliĢki varsayımını reddetmiĢtir. Rejim baskıcılığı ve siyasal Ģiddet arasındaki iliĢkiyi saptamaya çalıĢan araĢtırmalarda ise; siyasal Ģiddetin orta baskıcı bir rejim yapısı altında ortaya çıktığı görüĢü savunulmuĢtur. Kısacası bu çalıĢma gelir eĢitsizliği ve rejim baskıcılığındaki çeĢitliliğin siyasal Ģiddet seviyesi üzerindeki etkisini inceleyerek kaynak seferberliğine karĢı göreceli yoksunluk tartıĢmasıyla alakalı ulusa karĢı bir veri analizi bildirmektedir.

Propositions about determinants of political violence at the cross-national level are derived from rational action theory and tested across the entire population of independent states in the mid-1970s. The data support two rational action hypotheses: Rates of domestic political violence are higher at intermediate levels of both regime repressiveness and negative sanctions than at either low or high levels of these indicators of institutionalized and behavioral coercion. Two hypotheses that can be interpreted within either a rational action or a deprivation framework also are supported: High rates of economic growth reduce the incidence of political violence, and potential separatism increases the incidence of violence. A deprivation hypothesis that high life expectancy reduces the incidence of political violence is not supported. Overall, this set of findings favors a rational action rather than a deprivation approach to explaining why nations differ in rates of political violence.