Scholars of civil conflict have long recognized the importance of state strength in the production of civil peace. However, previous empirical investigations have generally focused on the material dimensions of state power, obscuring the critical role played by the generation of widespread voluntary compliance with state dictates, i.e. the production of domestic soft power. In contrast, in this paper I focus on a factor – mass communication technology – that can only enhance state capacity by strengthening the state's ability to broadly and publicly disseminate political messages. I argue that this allows mass communication technologies to dramatically lower the production cost of such normative influence, while at the same time generating powerful economies of scale in the development of political loyalties. As a result, strong mass media systems should be expected to produce substantial barriers to the mobilization of large-scale anti-state violence. Utilizing newly compiled cross-national data on mass media access in the post-World War II period, I show that this second face of state power – domestic soft power – is a crucial component of internal state effectiveness, producing more than a tenfold decrease in a country’s likelihood of experiencing the onset of civil war. Moreover, through a combination of standard regression analysis, non-parametric tests of predictive accuracy, Bayesian model averaging, and optimized matching estimators, I show that the pacifying effect of media access cannot be attributed to material capacities, economic development, or social modernization, and in fact is one of the most robust relationships yet identified in the quantitative literature on civil conflict.
Drawing on Clausewitz’ classical theory, we argue that the emergence of mass nationalism following the French Revolution profoundly altered the nature of the units constituting the interstate system, thereby transforming the conduct of interstate warfare. To validate these assertions -- and thus to test Clausewitz -- we rely on quantitative evidence at the macro-level, with a particular focus on the global distribution of interstate war sizes, measured in terms of battle deaths, over the past five centuries. Relying on Extreme Value Theory, we demonstrate that temporal discontinuities in the shapes of such tail distributions can be used to draw inferences about the nature of the mechanisms underlying the bloodiest events in world history. This approach allows us to show that the interstate system experienced a fundamental shift in the mechanisms underlying the production of war sizes; a shift which can be dated with remarkable precision to the years 1770-1810, and which resulted in a systematic increase in war severity. These same tools also allow us to rule out a number of alternative explanations for this shift (including changes in population sizes and changes in weapons technology), while providing evidence for a specific account of war severity rooted in the mobilizational capacities of states.
Despite significant advances in the disaggregation of the study of civil conflict and inter-ethnic violence, intra-ethnic violence remains understudied. In this paper, we present the first systematic, cross-national analysis of the conditions that promote violent, fragmentary conflict within politically active ethnic minorities. We propose a model of intra-ethnic conflict in which collective violence is produced by the interaction between sub-group entrepreneurs and the suppressive actions of the state. This two-level model predicts a curvilinear relationship between the relative size of an ethnic minority and its probability of experiencing large-scale intra-ethnic conflict. Additional hypotheses based on the proposed causal mechanism are also posited. These hypotheses are tested with panel data on 274 politically active ethnic minorities in 115 countries, using a combination of parametric and semi-parametric regression techniques. The results strongly confirm the predicted curvilinear relationship, while also demonstrating that the specific shape of this relationship shifts in predictable ways under varying social and political contexts.
In this article it is argued that interstate alliances function as public costly signals of state intentions to cooperate militarily, and as such, they should be expected to influence state expectations within dyads, between dyads, and across time. Accurate statistical modeling of interstate military alliances thus requires that researchers escape the assumption of independent units of observation, which is built into most of the statistical tools currently used by international relations scholars, as such models can be expected to produce unbiased parameter estimates in this domain only if the decisions to create and dissolve interstate alliances are formulated in isolated dyadic bubbles. The use of stochastic actor-oriented models, combined with Markov simulations of network evolution, is shown to be a productive alternative method of modeling interstate alliances, which allows the researcher to avoid the assumption of dyadic independence by incorporating theory-driven assumptions about patterns of extra-dyadic interdependence directly into the functional form of the statistical model. The results demonstrate that triadic patterns of amity and enmity exercise powerful influence over the selection of alliance partners and the evolution of the global alliance network. The results also show that failure to incorporate patterns of extra-dyadic interdependence into our statistical models of interstate alliance decisions is likely to result in biased parameter estimates.
In this paper, we demonstrate that changes in the partisan orientation of a country's executive branch influence the likelihood that the government of that country with comply with international legal commitments aimed at integration of capital markets. We argue that relative shifts in executive partisan orientation, whether towards the left or towards the right, represent important shifts in "national preferences" that have heretofore been absent from statistical models of treaty compliance. Using a matching estimator combined with a genetic algorithm to maximize balance in our sample, we show that the causal impact of a state signing Article VIII of the IMF Articles of Agreement is conditioned by right-to-left shifts in partisan orientation. The evidence indicates that such preference changes reduce the constraining effects of Article VIII, but also indicates that Article VIII continues to exercise significant causal effects even in the face of relative shifts in executive partisan orientation.
While variation in the power and size of states has long been recognized as one of the central drivers of geopolitical behavior, few studies have directly addressed the question of how and why different states came to be the sizes they did. The most prominent formal contributions to this question, based in a logic of voluntary optimization, fail to account for some of the most fundamental patterns observed in empirical data on state sizes, including the fact that territorial sizes are consistently lognormally distributed. In contrast, we develop an ecological model of coercive competition, which seeks to capture both the positive feedback dynamics inherent in states' pursuit of territorial expansion, and the physical constraints of projecting power over long distances. Moreover, we show that the empirical predictions derived from this model are in strong agreement, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with real distributions of state sizes observed over the period 1500 AD to 1998 AD.
While previous research has indicated that non-coercive forms of state influence can play a critical role the in prevention of civil conflict, the evidence for such claims has generally been based on national aggregates, obscuring the substantial variation in state capacity that exists within countries. In this paper I demonstrate that correspondence between geographic variation in the reach of broadcast communication technologies, and geographic variation in the topology of ethnic settlement patterns, exercises profound influence over the generation of anti-state violence. Using newly compiled data on the settlement locations of politically relevant ethnic groups, and geo-coded indicators of the costs of mass media penetration, I conduct a global disaggregated analysis of the relationship between domestic soft power and civil conflict mobilization at the level of specific ethnic groups. The results reveal that groups living in peripheral regions, especially those with terrain that generates difficulties for the deployment of mass communication infrastructure, face a dramatically heightened likelihood of violent rebellion.
Much of the contemporary literature on interstate conflict highlights the importance of signaling processes between potential and actual adversaries. The assumption frequently made in such work is that so-called "audience costs" allow leaders to more credibly signal their intentions by heightening the stakes leaders face in diverging from their stated positions. However, this mechanism assumes the presence of a particular kind of collective audience: a mass audience capable of jointly receiving messages and capable of generating coordinated responses to such messages. I argue that such mass mediated publics are not naturally occurring characteristics of the interstate system, but rather are constituted by particular domestic communicative structures. Moreover, those structures are not constants, but instead vary considerably over time and space. Using cross-national time-series data for the period 1945-1998, I demonstrate that the constraints produced by differing levels of media freedom and media density lead to significant differences in interstate conflict behavior, including the likelihood of dispute initiation and reciprocation. I further show that the “democratic peace” effect is actually conditional on domestic communicative structures, operating only in the presence of sufficiently free and sufficiently dense mass media networks.
