Cameron G. Thies

Of rulers, rebels, and revenue: State capacity, civil war onset, and primary commodities

This article investigates the relationship between civil war onset and state capacity through a focus on the role of primary commodities. This is accomplished by moving the focus of the civil war literature away from an almost exclusive concern with the incentives of rebels to a consideration of both rebels and rulers as revenue seeking predators. This predatory theory approach expects that higher levels of state capacity should deter civil war onset, while civil war onset should reduce state capacity. Further, natural resource rents are expected to enhance state capacity, rather than increase the likelihood of civil war onset. In order to deal with the endogeneity posed by including fiscal measures of state capacity in single equation models of civil war onset, this study employs a simultaneous equations framework. This framework allows us to capture the effects of civil war onset on state capacity and vice versa, as well as the effects of primary commodities on both endogenous covariates. The main findings from the statistical analyses include: state capacity does not affect civil war onset, but civil war onset reduces state capacity; and primary products directly affect only state capacity — they do not directly affect civil war onset, as found in previous contributions to the literature.

The Political Economy of State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper explores the state-building process in the developing world through an application of the European-inspired predatory theory of the state. Predatory theory relies heavily on war as a catalyst for state-building activities, but since it is such a rare event in the developing world, the paper turns to the literature on interstate rivalry for a theoretical and empirical substitute. The paper investigates whether this modification of predatory theory is portable to a spatial-temporal domain outside of early modern Europe by applying it in the context of the postcolonial developing states of sub-Saharan Africa. This is accomplished by examining the effects of both internal and external rivals on state extractive capacity in the region from 1975 to 2000. A series of pooled, cross-sectional time-series analyses suggest that both interstate and intrastate rivals affect state extractive capacity much as predatory theory would expect. However, predation to enhance state revenue in Africa has not set in motion the kinds of processes that ultimately led to the development of strong, cohesive, and responsive states as in the European experience.

The Political Economy of Agricultural Protection

In this paper we analyze the political economy of agricultural producer support in the OECD countries between 1986 and 2001. We review the variety of theories of agricultural protection created by economists to explain this apparent anomaly. Most of these theories give short shrift to institutional features of the political system by simply assuming that politics is determined by underlying economic factors. We explicitly include political institutional factors, such as veto players, federalism, party fragmentation, and the timing of elections, alongside traditional economic factors to model agricultural producer support. A political economy model demonstrates that agriculture should not be treated as the exception to our understanding of protectionism as is often the conclusion of previous econometric studies. The results of several cross-sectional time-series analyses suggest that agricultural producer support conforms to general patterns of protectionism in other areas of industry.

The State of Undergraduate Research Methods Training in Political Science

Debates over methodology have long occupied a prominent role in political science and its various empirical sub-fields. Recently, these debates and occasional dialogues seem to have intensified. The Perestroika movement within APSA protested the perceived hegemony of rational choice and quantitative methods in journal publications and graduate training (Kasza 2001). Renewed attention has focused on the types of methodologies employed by studies published in the disciplines leading journals (Garand and Giles 2003; Bennett, Barth, and Rutherford 2003; Braumoeller 2003). The kinds of concerns over methodological diversity that motivate these studies also inform discussions about graduate training (Alvarez 1992; Dyer 1992; Schwartz-Shea 2003; Morrow 2003; Smith 2003).

National Design and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines the political geography of state building in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The absence of interstate war has produced a unique situation for contemporary state builders in Africa—they have inherited states with relatively fixed borders encapsulating a variety of environmental and geographic conditions, compounded by varying distributions of population densities. The author examines the effects of a variety of strategies that African rulers have employed to enhance their state-building efforts given the type of national design they inhabit. These strategies include the allocation of citizenship, interventions in land tenure patterns, and the adoption and management of national currencies. The author tests the effects of these strategies on several dimensions of state capacity in sub-Saharan Africa from 1960 to 2004 using a variety of statistical analyses. The results indicate that the strategies currently adopted by african rulers have generally failed to substantially augment their capacity.

Sense and sensibility in the study of state socialisation: a reply to Kai Alderson

In a recent article in the Review of International Studies , Kai Alderson subjected the concept of state socialisation to considerable scrutiny. This kind of conceptual clarification is fundamental to both theory building and empirical work in the study of international relations. Alderson should be commended for his work on the concept, since there are only a handful of previous studies that explicitly explore state socialisation in any detail. However, his attempt to produce a ‘consensus definition’ of the concept to bring clarity to an emerging research programme has left me with more questions than answers. This essay is designed to raise questions about Aldersons conceptualisation of state socialisation based on a comparison with the literature on socialisation from other disciplines. The overarching goal is to stimulate healthy debate about a concept that should be central to our understanding of the social aspects of international politics.

A Social Psychological Approach to Enduring Rivalries

The recent scholarly work on the concept of enduring rivalries offers a promising way to examine strategic interaction among dyads of states over extended periods of time. A focus on rivalry, and on the mechanisms that provide for such interaction, may offer a way to bridge existing theories of international relations that rely exclusively on structure or process. Unfortunately, the potential for theory-building has not been fully realized because research into rivalry has tended to be inductive. This paper seeks to rectify that problem by situating the rivalry concept within a social psychological approach to international relations. The rivalry concept is appropriately located in a theoretical approach that views the international system as a social system where actors are conditioned by mechanisms of competition and socialization.

Public Violence and State Building in Central America

This article examines the role played by war, and public violence more generally, in the state-building experiences of Central America. Bellicist theory expects that wars provide a stimulus to extractive efforts, thus enhancing the autonomy and capacity of the state over time, though recent qualitative studies of South America find the opposite. I expand the reach of bellicist theory to Central America through the broader concept of public violence, which captures the long-term impact of external and internal rivals on the state. The quantitative tests demonstrate that Central American interstate and civil wars reduce the extractive ability of states, consistent with the South American evidence. Interstate rivals stimulate extractive efforts among governments, whereas intrastate rivals detract from those efforts. Incorporating the concept of public violence into bellicist theory thus helps to increase our understanding of Central American state building.

State Socialization and Structural Realism

One of the common criticisms of Kenneth Waltzs Theory of International Politics is that its structural model is rather spare. This paper enriches neorealism by specifying the conditioning effects of competition and socialization operating on behalf of the international structure. Despite its neglected status in neorealist theory, I argue that socialization produces important effects on interstate interaction. I develop a model of the socialization process that uses role theory to demonstrate how interstate interaction is structured at the micro-level. Consistent with neorealism, the model assumes that socialization is heavily conditioned by material capabilities, and operates mainly on the adjustment of state behavior. I analyze several episodes of U.S. history to demonstrate that neorealism can explain how unit-level behavior is structured through socialization. The resulting elaboration of neorealism offers a more fully specified structural theory of international politics.

What We Mean by Scope and Methods: A Survey of Undergraduate Scope and Methods Courses

Self-reflective political scientists have extensively reviewed the history of the discipline and argued over its future, but to date there has been little effort to systematically survey undergraduate scope and methods courses (for an exception see Thies and Hogan 2005 ). This lack of data leaves the discipline unable to assess how much we are teaching undergraduates about the scope of political science or, indeed, what we mean by the scope of the discipline. Similarly, though there have been many battles waged over the appropriateness of various methodologies, it is not clear how much of this discussion, or how many of these methods, make it into the undergraduate classroom. Survey results from a nation-wide sample of political science departments indicate that most departments require a scope and methods course of their majors and that, while there is a great deal of variety in topics covered, some common themes exist and some common assignments are used.