Clayton L. Thyne

Bones of Contention: Comparing Territorial, Maritime, and River Issues

Contentious issues are important sources of militarized conflict. This article advances an issue-based approach to world politics, focusing on disagreements over territory, maritime zones, and cross-border rivers. We characterize militarized conflict and peaceful techniques as substitutable foreign policy tools that states can adopt to resolve disagreements over issues, and we present hypotheses to account for issue management based on issue salience and recent interaction over the same issue. Empirical analyses reveal that states are more likely to use both militarized conflict and peaceful methods when the issue at stake is more salient, both when the general issue type is considered more salient and when the specific issue under contention has greater within-issue salience. Recent issue management also plays an important role, as histories of both militarized conflict and failed peaceful settlements increase pressure to take further action to settle the issue.

Global instances of coups from 1950 to 2010: A new dataset

Once considered a ‘hot topic’ among scholars, research on coups d’état has waned in recent years. This decline is surprising given that 7 coups have happened between January 2008 and December 2010, bringing the last decade’s total to almost three dozen. One explanation for the lack of coup research is the absence of a temporally and spatially comprehensive dataset to test theories. Also absent is a discussion of what makes coups distinct from other forms of anti-regime activity. This article seeks to remedy these problems. The authors present a new dataset on coups from 1950 to 2010. They begin by explaining their theoretical definition and coding procedures. Next, they examine general trends in the data across time and space. The authors conclude by explaining why scholars studying a variety of topics, including civil wars, regime stability, and democratization, would benefit by paying closer attention to coups.

The Effect of Civil War on Education, 1980--97

This study examines the negative effects of civil wars and the post-civil war environment on educational expenditures and enrollment. Two causal mechanisms are considered. First, civil wars are likely to destroy a states system of education through the loss of infrastructure and personnel. Second, a less deleterious cause may be the drawing away of funds for increased military expenditures to fight the civil war. Using UNESCO education data, the authors examine the percent change in educational expenditures and primary, secondary, and tertiary enrollment for all states from 1980 through 1997. The authors use a measure of when a state is in a civil war, a dynamic post-civil war measure, an interaction with military spending, and relevant control variables. The results indicate strong support for the notion that civil war is devastating for a system of education, as both expenditures and enrollment decline during periods of civil war. No support was found for the reallocation of education funds towards military spending during a civil war. These results highlight the importance of addressing the social costs of a civil war. Civil wars do not simply impose social costs because of increased funding to the military; rather, they severely disrupt a states ability to provide even basic social services.

Cheap Signals with Costly Consequences: The Effect of Interstate Relations on Civil War

This article examines the effect of interstate signals on the probability of civil war onset. Using a bargaining framework, the author argues that costly signals should have no effect on the likelihood that a civil war begins because they allow the government and opposition to peacefully adjust their bargaining positions to avoid the costs of fighting. In contrast, cheap signals can disrupt intrastate negotiations, which makes conflict more likely by increasing the likelihood that one of the competing parties will make excessive demands. This argument is tested using measures for sanctions, troop mobilization, alliances, and trade ties as indicators for costly signals, as well as events data as measures for cheap signals. Results demonstrate that cheap signals strongly affect the probability of civil war onset, while costly signals do not. Cheap signals hostile to the government increase the likelihood of civil war onset, while cheap supportive signals have a pacifying effect.

Supporter of stability or agent of agitation? The effect of US foreign policy on coups in Latin America, 1960—99

This article takes a two-step approach to improving our understanding of how US foreign policy signals affect the likelihood of coups in Latin America. First, a large body of qualitative literature has developed a ‘conventional wisdom’ on this subject, suggesting that pressure from the USA plays a key role in stabilizing favored leaders and destabilizing unfavored leaders. Meanwhile, quantitative scholarship analyzing coups focuses almost exclusively on intrastate factors. The first step brings these two bodies of work together by providing quantitative evidence that hostile US signals increase the likelihood of coups, while supportive signals have a stabilizing effect. The second step moves beyond the conventional wisdom by (1) reconsidering theoretical assumptions within the conventional argument and (2) identifying anomalies within the preliminary empirical analyses. These efforts reveal several factors that are likely to impact how coup plotters respond to US signals. Among these factors, empirical analyses indicate that US signals are particularly important when economic dependence on the USA increases, during the middle of a US president’s term in office, when they have moderate levels of consistency, and when they specifically mention the military. Overall, the first stage of this article provides a robust confirmation of the conventional wisdom, while the second stage moves the literature down a path that is largely unexplored by previous work.

Learning Democracy: Education and the Fall of Authoritarian Regimes

Studies on what causes a state to democratize have focused on economic, social, and international factors. Many of them argue that higher levels of education should promote democracy. However, few articulate clearly how education affects democratization, and fewer still attempt to test the supposed link across time and space. This article fills that gap by considering how different levels of education influence democratization, and the conditions under which education is most likely to promote democracy. Analyses of eighty-five authoritarian spells from 1970 to 2008 find that higher levels of mass, primary, and tertiary education are robustly associated with democratization. Secondary analyses indicate that education is most effective in promoting democratization when both males and females are educated. An illustration from Tunisia follows.

The impact of coups d’état on civil war duration

This paper considers how coups d’état influence the duration of civil wars. While previous work on civil war duration has ignored coups, grouped them alongside civil wars or considered them as a special type of conflict, this article recognizes coups as dramatic events that can quickly change the course of a conflict. Coups that take place during a civil war can shock an otherwise intractable bargaining situation, shortening the war’s duration. This shock influences both information and credibility concerns. Coups condense government preferences into a single, unified viewpoint and allow governments to efficiently translate preferences into action. They likewise combine the military with the government, effectively eliminating the military as a potential spoiler, which helps ease the commitment problem. These expectations are tested by examining the impact of successful coups on civil war duration, 1950–2009. Results suggest that coups indeed serve as peace-inducing shocks, primarily by working through the credibility mechanism.

Secession, legitimacy and the use of child soldiers

Child soldiers remain a stark reminder of the suffering caused by civil wars. This paper explores the long-term calculations that rebel leaders employ when deciding whether or not to use child soldiers. A norm against the use of child soldiers has been strongly stated by the international community. Given their need to attract international support to achieve their goal of state recognition, we argue that separatist rebellions are unlikely to use child soldiers because they are constrained by these norms. We test our expectation on a newly collected dataset of child soldier use from 1998 to 2008. Our analyses find considerable support that separatists are more likely to follow accepted norms and refrain from using underage troops. Consistent with previous work, we also find that child soldier use increases as the duration of the war increases, when there is a vulnerable supply of internally displaced people, as youth unemployment increases, and when rebel groups rely on illicit funds.

Social Constraints and Civil War: Bridging the Gap with Criminological Theory

Scholars’ views on civil warfare have changed dramatically. Understanding that conventional and ideological civil wars are rare, scholars are increasingly coming to view rebellions as large-scale criminality. However, much work remains to link criminality and civil conflict. The authors draw on a large body of criminological research known as social control theory, which identifies informal factors that are expected to produce conformity with norms and laws, such as social attachments, commitment to achieve goals, involvement in the community, and belief that law is just. While a plethora of work has linked these processes to criminological behavior, the authors build a bridge to the civil war literature. Empirical tests examine how marriage, unemployment and military involvement impact the one’s “taste for revolt” at the individual-level, and the likelihood of civil war onset at the macrolevel. The results present a robust empirical link between social control theory and internal conflict.

Squeaky wheels and unequal policy: Executive authority and education reform in Latin America

The World Bank has been increasingly involved in reforming Latin Americas education systems. However, compliance with World Bank directives varies greatly. Recent scholarship has made significant progress in fashioning an explanation for this variation by focusing on the presence of democracy. This article takes the literature a step further by identifying the mechanism by which democracy matters. Specifically, variations in executive authority are key factors in explaining the adoption of controversial World Bank directives. The authors argue that a governments ability to implement World Bank reforms and overcome popular dissent, if present, is a function of executive authority. They examine executive authority using several measures to test their hypotheses on a 20-year panel of 17 American states from 1980 to 2000. Results indicate that newly democratized governments and strong executives are indeed more successful in passing World Bank reforms.