Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractWhen and why ethnic groups rebel remains a central puzzle in the civil war literature. In this paper we examine how different types of inequalities affect both an ethnic group's willingness and opportunity to fight. We argue that political and economic inter-group inequalities motivate ethnic groups to initiate a fight against the state, and that intra-group economic inequality lowers their elite's costs of providing the necessary material and/or purposive incentives to overcome collective action problems inherent to rebel recruitment. We therefore predict that internally unequal ethnic groups excluded from power and/or significantly richer or poorer relative to the country's average are most likely to engage in a civil war. To assess our claim empirically, we develop a new global measure of economic inequality by combining high resolution satellite images of light emissions, spatial population data, and geocoded ethnic settlement areas. After validating our measure at the country-and group-level we include it in a standard statistical model of civil war onset and find considerable support for our theoretical prediction: greater economic inequality within an ethnic group significantly increases the risk of conflict, especially if political or economic inequalities between groups provide a motive.

We examine whether there is an environmental version of the Kantian peace; that is, whether democracies that trade and are bound by international treaties are less likely to harm each other environmentally. Specifically, we study five factors that are likely to help in reducing beggar-thy-neighbour behaviour in terms of transboundary pollution: democracy, supranational institutions, trade relations, stringency of domestic environmental policy and international environmental commitment. The empirical focus is on upstream-downstream water pollution in Europe in 1970-2003. The observed effects of the five variables differ considerably across forms of pollution and definitions of beggar-thy-neighbour behaviour. Some of our explanatory variables contribute to reducing beggar-thy-neighbour behaviour. Hence there is some empirical support for the environmental Kantian argument. Nonetheless, state behaviour in this area remains characterized by free-riding incentives; the forces of democracy, trade and national and international regulation and institutions do not easily produce decent international behaviour.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Abstract How natural disasters a↵ect politics in developing countries is an important question given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to climate change. Research in sociology and psychology suggests traumatic events can inspire pro-social behavior and therefore might increase political engagement. Research in political science argues that economic resources are critical for political engagement and thus the economic dislocation from disasters may dampen participation. We argue that when the government and civil society response e↵ectively blunts a disaster's economic impacts, then political engagement may increase as citizens learn about government capacity. Using diverse data from the massive 2010-11 Pakistan floods, we find that Pakistanis in highly flood-a↵ected areas turned out to vote at substantially higher rates three years later than those less exposed. We also provide speculative evidence on the mechanism. The increase in turnout was higher in areas with lower ex ante flood risk, which is consistent with a learning process. These results suggest that natural disasters may not necessarily undermine civil society in emerging developing democracies. (JEL: A12, D72, D74, I28, How do natural disasters a↵ect politics in developing countries? Addressing this question is important given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013). The existing social science literature makes contradictory predictions. On the one hand, research from sociology and psychology suggests that traumatic events such as natural disasters can inspire pro-social behavior and therefore might increase political engagement (e.g., Bardo, 1978;Bolin and Stanford, 1998;Rodriguez, Trainor and Quarantelli, 2006;Toya and Skidmore, 2014). If this is the case, then disasters might enhance the quality of government by increasing accountability pressures and selecting for a higher-quality political class (e.g., Putnam, Leonardi and Nanetti, 1994;Besley, 2007). On the other hand, political scientists have argued that economic resources are critical ingredients for civic engagement (e.g., Verba, Schlozman and Brady, 1995). Kosec and Mo (2015) find that economic shocks resulting from natural disasters can reduce citizen aspiration levels, whic...

A considerable literature examines the effect of voter information on candidate strategies and voter–politician interactions in the developing world. The voter information literature argues that information can improve accountability because more informed voters are harder to woo with traditional campaign tools, such as ethnic appeals and vote-buying. However, this literature has largely ignored the reaction of political candidates and thus may reach conclusions that are overly optimistic regarding the impact of information on electoral accountability. We argue that voter information can increase electoral violence in developing countries where politicians face fewer institutional constraints on their campaign tactics. When violence is used as a campaign strategy, more informed electorates are more at risk because they are harder to sway through alternative campaign techniques. Using data from 35 African countries, we show that respondents receiving their news predominantly from newspapers are a good proxy for informed voters because they differ in terms of their political attitudes from respondents consuming no news or receiving it via other channels. Combining the geo-coded survey data with pre-electoral violence event data, we find a robust positive association between newspaper readership and fear of and exposure to campaign violence. This finding contributes to the micro-foundations of election violence and adds a cautionary note for voter information programs.