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Communicative Structure
and the
Emergence of Armed Conflict

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Abstract:

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a logically coherent and empirically grounded account of the relationships between collective communication, collective loyalties, and collective violence. Drawing on research from an array of disciplines, ranging from psychology to economics and sociology, I develop a new theoretical framework that I term “communicative structuralism.” The central claim of this framework is that the communicative processes upon which the formation of collective identities and loyalties are based are structurally constrained in systematic ways. More specifically, it claims that public communicative structures, those which transmit synchronized messages and thus generate joint awareness of those messages amongst a collective audience, are central to the development of national, sub-national, and transnational symbolic allegiances because they create communities of shared experience and thereby generate symbolic touchstones which allow individuals to feel connected to a seemingly unified moral community.

To test this theory, I collect data on the structural properties of the most prominent public communicative structures in the contemporary state system – those constituted by the mass media networks of newspapers, radios, and televisions – in 177 countries for the period 1945 – 1999. I then use this data to test the implications of the theory at two separate levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level the theory is tested using cross-national survey data on media exposure and state allegiance from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries, and (2) at the state level the theory is tested using cross-national time-series data on civil conflict, identity fragmentation, and regime stability. I each case, the central finding is that mass media structures are fundamentally involved in generating the conditions for the formation of collective audiences (that is, audiences which are composed of members who are jointly aware of themselves as a collective). The dissertation demonstrates that such collective audiences, when constituted on a national scale by dense public communicative structures (i.e. mass media), make individuals more inclined to feel affective attachments to their country, and reduce the propensity to sociopolitical fragmentation thereby lessening the risk of large-scale civil conflict. In making this demonstration, the dissertation attempts to triangulate through the use of a wide variety of quantitative techniques, including multilevel hierarchical linear models, structural equation models, non-parametric tests of predictive accuracy, Bayesian model averaging, social network analysis, and agent-based computational simulations. I also ground the analysis in careful qualitative process-tracing of the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation.

Chapter Summaries:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Instead of diving into the details of the theory, I attempt to first ground the reader’s intuition by presenting a qualitative analysis of the media dynamics surrounding the disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The analysis presents two contrasting narratives of the process: (a) a “standard” account that focuses on the frames and categories deployed in mass media messages, and (b) a “structural” account that focuses on the distribution of opportunities for transmission and reception. The structural account reveals many anomalies that would be obscured by purely content-based approaches to media analysis.

Chapter 2: A Theory of Communicative Structuralism

This chapter presents the dissertation’s central theoretical arguments. I define public communicative structures as those which allow for synchronized transmission and joint awareness of reception, and argue that such structures (exemplified by the mass media) facilitate the development of abstract symbolic allegiances because they create communities of shared experience. I also define the concepts of structural density and structural bias, and claim that these network properties should be expected to influence they scale upon which collective loyalties can be effectively constituted. The theory shows that as the public communicative structures operating at a given scale (e.g. village or nation) are strengthened, the proclivities to loyalty fragmentation that drive the emergence of security dilemmas and collective violence at that scale are reduced.

Chapter 3: Mass Communication and Mass Mobilization: An Agent-Based Model of Sociopolitical Fragmentation

In this chapter, I develop a model of inter-group communicative competition using agent-based computational simulations. I argue that agent-based models offer a means of rigorously formalizing the mechanisms underlying a causal theory, while avoiding the need for strict game theoretic assumptions about agents’ abilities and interactions. The simulations are not intended as tests of the theory, but rather are used as virtual laboratories for hypothesis generation. Through repeated simulation runs under varying conditions, I derive number of observable implications, including that increased media density should lessen the connection between political cleavages and social cleavages, increase the average size of stable groups, and decrease the vulnerability to sociopolitical fragmentation.

Chapter 4: Mass Media Structure and the Micro-Logic of National Attachments

Here I test the implications of the theory of communicative structuralism at the individual level. Using cross-national survey data from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries, I show that each individual’s allegiance to their national community is a function not only of their individual characteristics, but also a function of the communicative context in which they are operating. On the basis of hierarchical linear models which allow me to directly test for cross-level interaction effects between individual-level variables and country-level variables, I confirm the following implications of the theory: (1) the greater an individual's exposure to the mass media, the greater their likelihood of indicating allegiance to their national community, as measured by their willingness to fight for their country in the event of a war; (2) the greater the density of the broadcast network in a particular country (radios and/or televisions per capita), the greater the magnitude of the individual-level effects of mass media exposure on national allegiance. In other words, while higher exposure to the mass media is always associated with higher probability of nation-state allegiance (at the level of the individual), those effects become far more pronounced when an individual is operating in a country with a dense mass media network.

Chapter 5: Mass Media Structure, Economic Development, and the Emergence of Civil Conflict

This chapter tests the implications of the theory at the state level. I argue that important deficiencies in the most prominent statistical models in the civil conflict literature have resulted from a failure to adequately theorize the informational context that underlies the intersubjective construction of state strength. Large-scale civil conflict is generally driven not by insufficient repressive capabilities on the part of the state, but rather by the emergence of deeply divided generalized loyalties (i.e. symbolic attachments), either amongst elites or amongst the broader mass population. The results demonstrate that mass media density (as captured by per capita receivership capabilities) is strongly and negatively related to the probability of civil conflicts characterized by large-scale sociopolitical fragmentation. In other words, the more densely constituted the moral community of the nation-state, the less vulnerable it is to the types of fragmentation sought by rebel insurgents. Further, using a combination of non-parametric tests of predictive accuracy, Bayesian model averaging, and structural equation models, I demonstrate that the oft-cited negative relationship between GDP per capita and civil conflict is actually an artifact of communicative structure.

Chapter 6: Conclusion

I conclude by briefly discussing the structural implications of the emerging dominance of non-territorial mass media technologies, such as satellite broadcasting and the internet. I argue that international relations theorists must seriously consider the likely changes in the nature of armed conflict in the 21st century that will be wrought by the increasing prominence of transnational publics and transnational symbolic loyalties.