Buying War Not Peace

Abstract

This article presents robust findings for the positive effect of corruption on the risk of ethnic civil war, using binary time-series-cross-section data that cover 87 to 121 countries (per year) between 1984 and 2007. Following a grievance-based explanation of violent intrastate conflict, we argue that corruption increases the risk of large-scale ethnic violence, as it creates distortions in the political decision-making process which lead to a deepening of political and economic inequalities between different ethnic groups. The positive effect of corruption on the risk of ethnic civil war is robust to various model specifications, including the interaction between corruption and natural resource wealth.

Territorial self-governance and proportional representation: reducing the risk of territory-centred intrastate violence

“…While an instrumental variables approach arguably would be most preferable (Miguel et al, 2004), all of the variables that we have tried as instruments fall short of the basic requirement of being highly correlated with territorial self-governance and uncorrelated with territory-centred intrastate violence. For lack of better alternatives, and following other examples in the civil war literature such as Fearon and Laitin (2003), we therefore deal with endogeneity in our statistical models by lagging all main explanatory variables and possibly affected control variables, that is, GDP per capita, population size, level of socioeconomic inequalities, recent experience of political instability, level of democracy and its square, and status as oil exporter (see also Neudorfer & Theuerkauf, 2014b). We use a one-year lag, but our results remain robust when increasing it to five years.…”

“…The distinction of political institutions depending on whether they are relatively more concerned with the input or output side of representative politics has relevant implications for the causal mechanisms that may link institutional design to the risk of violent intrastate conflict. Specifically, it highlights the need to refine grievance-based arguments which see violent conflict as an expression of frustrations over issues of political exclusion and the (real or perceived) inability of certain groups to be represented fairly in comparison to some reference group (Gurr, 2000;Neudorfer & Theuerkauf, 2014b;Theuerkauf, 2010a): Given the focus of grievance-based arguments on sentiments amongst entire communities, one should expect grievances over issues of political exclusion to be primarily concerned with the input side of the political process and thus the extent to which certain groups may feel that formal political institutions prevent their representatives from gaining a 'fair' amount of political offices (Cederman et al, 2015;Strøm et al, 2017). Grievances over the structural constraints that affect interactions between political elites once voted into power, in this sense, are likely to be a (still relevant but by comparison) secondary issue, as it is arguably the input side of political regimes that affects immediate concerns over who gets access to political power, how likely societal diversity will be reflected at the political decision-making table, and which groups have the political resources needed to further their interests (Ganghof, 2010;Gurr, 2000).…”

Twenty Years After Dayton: Bosnia-Herzegovina (Still) Stable and Explosive

“…The would-be rulers can accuse rulers of corruption and benefit from popular support to precipitate rapid political change through violence. Neudorfer and Theuerkauf (2014) find that corruption increases the risk of large-scale ethnic violence, because it distorts the political decisionmaking process, leading to a deepening of political and economic inequalities between different ethnic groups.…”

Banking performance and institutional quality: Evidence from dynamic panel data analysis

“…Most of the Literature finds the negative impact of corruption on political stability (Farzanegan & Witthuhn, 2017;Shleifer & Vishny, 1993). Neudorfer and Theuerkauf (2014) state that corruption enhances the risk of ethnic civil war contributing to government instability. They suggest that corruption widens the gap of economic and political inequalities between ethnic groups, consequently increasing the risk of large-scale instability and conflict.…”