We study effects of wartime violence on social cohesion in the context of Nepal's 10-year civil war. We begin with the observation that violence increased levels of collective action like voting and community organization-a finding consistent with other recent studies of postconflict societies. We use lab-in-the-field techniques to tease apart such effects. Our causalidentification strategy exploits communities' exogenous isolation from the unpredictable path of insurgency combined with matching. We find that violence-affected communities exhibit higher levels of prosocial motivation, measured by altruistic giving, public good contributions, investment in trust-based transactions, and willingness to reciprocate trustbased investments. We find evidence to support two social transformation mechanisms: (1) a purging mechanism by which less social persons disproportionately flee communities plagued by war and (2) a collective coping mechanism by which individuals who have few options to flee band together to cope with threats. The effects of war on social cohesion are due to a combination of psychological change, changes in individuals' material conditions and the incentives they face, and death and displacement that permanently alter the composition of communities. From a historical perspective, understanding precisely how violence transforms social cohesion is crucial for understanding how war affects a country's political development. From a practical perspective, understanding how violence transforms social cohesion is necessary for anticipating the political consequences of different wartime strategies (e.g., insurgency or counterinsurgency strategies). Changes in the social cohesion landscape are also important features of the social and political context for designing postconflict reconstruction. Indeed, postconflict social and political programming has tended to assume that war fragments
Previous statistical studies of the effects of UN peacekeeping have generally suggested that UN interventions have a positive effect on building a sustainable peace after civil war. Recent methodological developments have questioned this result because the cases in which the United Nations intervened were quite different from those in which they did not. Therefore the estimated causal effect may be due to the assumptions of the model that the researchers chose rather than to peacekeeping itself. The root of the problem is that UN missions are not randomly assigned. We argue that standard approaches for dealing with this problem (Heckman regression and instrumental variables) are invalid and impracticable in the context of UN peacekeeping and would lead to estimates of the effects of UN operations that are largely a result of the assumptions of the statistical model rather than the data. We correct for the effects of nonrandom assignment with matching techniques on a sample of UN interventions in post-Cold-War conflicts and find that UN interventions are indeed effective in the sample of post-civil-conflict interventions, but that UN interventions while civil wars are still ongoing have no causal effect.
Intra-industry trade-trade in different varieties of the same product between countries with similar factor endowments-has been an important and surprising feature of the postwar international economy. Economists have explained this trade with models of monopolistic competition, which suggest that intra-industry trade does not have the stark distributional consequences that the more traditional "endowments-based" trade does. I do not dispute that claim here, although I do dispute a political implication drawn from it-that intra-industry trade produces less political action than endowments-based trade. I argue that, because firms involved in intra-industry trade are monopolists, lobbying essentially becomes a private good. If intra-industry trade places costs on firms, they do not have less incentive to take political action to stop it, as the conventional wisdom suggests. I provide evidence for this contention from complaints lodged with the International Trade Commission. The results show that the higher the degree of intra-industry trade the more likely an industry will request protection from the ITC.Political studies of lobbying on trade policy have an important past in political science and economic history, including some of the classic works in the field (Schattschneider, 1935;Bauer, Poole, and Dexter, 1963;Taussig, 1966). More recently, economists and political scientists have applied more formal and quantitative techniques to the issue in the "endogenous tariff literature" (Magee, Brock, and Young, 1989, Baldwin, 1986, Pincus, 1977, and Lavergne, 1983 are only a few examples). However, while the endogenous tariff literature has grown in size, so has another economics literature that suggests that its economic assumptions are irrelevant to most of world trade. Specifically, the endogenous tariff literature relies on models that explain trade by the different factor endowments of the trading countries-either the "mobile factors" version of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, or the "specific factors" version of the Ricardo-Viner model. Some economists, meanwhile, have wrestled with the fact that the bulk of world trade cannot be explained by those endowments-based models of trade flows. Most of world trade is instead the intra-industry type-trade in different varieties of the same product produced with the same factors of production.The implications of these newer models for trade-related redistributions of wealth within countries are quite ambiguous. In fact, industries in both the home and the International Studies Quarterly (1997) 41, [455][456][457][458][459][460][461][462][463][464][465][466][467][468][469][470][471][472][473][474]
In this paper, we argue that claims of necessity and sufficiency involve a type of asymmetric causal claim that is useful in many social scientific contexts. Contrary to some qualitative researchers, we maintain that there is nothing about such asymmetries that should lead scholars to depart from standard social science practice. We take as given that deterministic and monocausal tests are inappropriate in the social world and demonstrate that standard multiplicative interaction models are up to the task of handling asymmetric causal claims in a multivariate, probabilistic manner. We illustrate our argument with examples from the empirical literature linking electoral institutions and party system size.
It is commonly thought that there is a trade-off between the breadth and depth of multilateral institutions-that is, multilaterals that are more inclusive in their memberships will necessarily be shallower in their level of cooperation+ Using a multilateral bargaining model with self-seeking rational actors, I show that such a trade-off does not exist for a broad class of multilateral cooperation problems+ The conclusion that there is a broader-deeper trade-off follows from the assumption that the members of the multilateral must set their policies at an identical level+ The multilateral agreement modeled in this article allows states to set their policies at different levels+ Once this change is made, there is no broader-deeper trade-off, a finding that has obvious empirical and policy implications+ It explains why some regimes are created with fairly large memberships at the outset, and it calls into question the policy prescription of limiting membership of multilateral institutions to a small group of committed cooperators for the class of cooperation problems modeled in this article+ I am indebted to the editor, an anonymous reviewer,
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