Michelle Benson

Power Parity, Democracy, and the Severity of Internal Violence:

This study applies insights from the power parity and the democratic peace perspectives to the issue of internal political violence. These two international relations perspectives translate well to the domain of domestic politics. Relative parity of resources between the government and the opposition are shown to lead to higher levels of violence. Democratic countries with highly competitive and participatory institutions are able to mitigate violent conflict within their borders. Efficient governments preserve domestic peace regardless of institutional format. Results of the study suggest that violence is generated by similar changes in both domestic and world politics.

INTERPERSONAL TRUST AND THE MAGNITUDE OF PROTEST A Micro and Macro Level Approach

The authors demonstrate that interpersonal trust is an important factor in motivating protest participation and raising the intensity of protest. They suggest that high levels of trust make individuals likely to anticipate low expected costs of participation while leading to optimistic estimates of the potential benefits of protest. Using 1990 World Values Survey data for 33 countries, a series of multinomial logistic regressions confirms that interpersonal trust plays an important role in determining both militant and nonmilitant forms of protest. These findings hold at the individual level in both free and nonfree societies. The authors also find some evidence that the same relationships hold at the national level. In addition, trust and postmaterialist values are shown to have complementary roles in fostering protest, whereas education is largely insignificant. Interpersonal trust, therefore, serves as both a personal and a social capital resource that fosters collective action in the form of protest.

The Relevance of Politically Relevant Dyads in the Study of Interdependence and Dyadic Disputes

The role of dyadic trade dependence in reducing conflict has been a subject of some dispute in the recent literature. Liberals have presented strong evidence that a higher level of trade dependence leads to lower probabilities of dyadic disputes, while an equally compelling literature has generated evidence that elevated levels of trade dependence generally increase the likelihood of disputes, or that dependence only decreases the likelihood of conflict for certain pairs of states under specific conditions. Unfortunately, the direct comparison of these competing perspectives has been hindered by the use of different estimation techniques, variable measurements, data sets, and samples. While recent work has attempted to provide a more systematic analysis of the effect of different data sets and sample choices on the relationship between interdependence and conflict (Schneider, Barbieri, & Gleditsch, 2003), no theoretical reason has been put forward as to why estimation results for some samples should differ from others. This paper employs three different data sets (Russett & Oneal, 2001; Barbieri, 2002; and Gleditsch, 2002) to test the effects of sample choice, especially that of politically relevant dyads, on the relationship between interdependence and conflict. Following Polachek, Robst, and Chang (1999) I note that the gains from trade are not homogeneous across dyad type; thus, the use of a politically relevant sample leads to biased estimates of the relationship between trade and conflict. Using a model that has been found to be critical of the liberal perspective (Barbieri, 2002), the results show that trade dependence does not have the same impact on conflict for dyads of different sizes. In sum, dyads with larger economies and high levels of trade salience have lower probabilities of conflict than dyads with smaller economies and equivalent amounts of trade.

Means, Motives and Opportunities in Ethno-Nationalist Mobilization

Building on the most important theoretical tools from the literatures on social movements and nationalism, we propose a model of the intensity of nationalist political behavior in which a communitys means, motives, and opportunities assume the central roles in the initiation and escalation of nationalist contentious politics. We then test this model using multinomial logit on original data from the seventeen autonomous communities of Spain over a twenty-year period. The results demonstrate that the means, motives, and opportunities assume vital, yet nonlinear, roles in determining a communitys level of electoral, violent, and nonviolent contentious activity. The findings also show that there are crucial differences in what accounts for the moves to electoral contention, to protest, and to rebellion. Several of these factors are uniformly escalatory on the intensity of contention—especially repression, social mobilization, and regime change—while others, most importantly democracy, have a moderating effect on the generation of conflict. The results further imply processes of a diffusion of rebellious activities and of an organizational-level substitution effect between violent and nonviolent forms of political behavior. At the aggregate community level, however, escalation in contention involves a “cumulative effect” rather than a classic “substitution effect.”

United Nations Bias and Force Commitments in Civil Conflicts

A sizeable literature has been devoted to determining the effectiveness of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping in ending civil wars. Much less work has attempted to improve our understanding of the force-level commitments made by the UN to ongoing conflicts. We systematically address the issue of UN force commitments to civil conflicts and their relation to conflict hostility. Specifically, we posit that UN force deployments are a product of UN Security Council (UNSC) bias in favor of or against individual conflict factions and the battlefield performance of those combatants. To test our arguments, we employ newly collected data on UNSC resolution bias, monthly peacekeeping personnel commitments, and dynamic monthly-conflict conditions for African civil conflicts over the 1991–2008 period. We find that bias in UNSC resolutions is an important determinant of UN troop-deployment levels when its preferred side is sustaining higher casualties. These findings have important implications for peacekeeping effectiveness.

Structure, Politics, and Action: An Integrated Model of Nationalist Protest and Rebellion

This article presents an integrated model of contentious nationalist activity, with structure, politics, and action assuming equal roles in an interdependent causal system. The model is tested using simultaneous equation systems on 130 ethno-nationalist groups from 1990 to 1998. The results confirm the vital, indirect role of grievances and group identity on protest and the powerful direct and indirect effects of political opportunity structure variables on protest and rebellion. Repression is shown to have a particularly escalatory impact on the conflict process.

Dyadic Hostility and the Ties That Bind: State-to-State versus State-to-System Security and Economic Relationships

An important question in the conflict processes literature concerns what types of international relationships are more likely to lead to peaceful interactions. Both security and economic ties have been posited as powerful determinants of conflict, yet their effects are often examined independently from one another. Furthermore, a debate exists as to whether it is states’ ties to the international order or to each other that are most important in determining conflict. A resolution of the competing perspectives would expect that two states that have a tight network of security and economic relationships, both to each other and to the international order, should be extremely unlikely to engage in hostile action against each other. Surprisingly, a series of multinomial logits using non-directed dyads from 1951 to 1985 suggests that dyads with tight economic and security ties at both the state-to-state and statetosystem levels are only slightly less likely to engage in dyadic disputes than those without such simultaneous ties. However, this study finds that both (1) tight security and economic ties to the international order and (2) tight intra-dyadic security and economic ties have important, independent effects in limiting dyadic hostility. This suggests that the states within a dyad have two separate paths to more peaceful interactions - the first lies in tightening ties between states, the second in strengthening dyadic security and economic ties to the international order.

The Dynamics of Ethnonationalist Contention

The political expression of ethnopolitical communities spans three primary forms – electoral party politics, social movement protest behaviour, and violent rebellion. Previous literature, however, has studied these three strategies in isolation from one another. Using new data on the 17 autonomous communities of Spain, we test the ability of a prevailing model of ethnopolitical conflict (Gurr 1993a, 1993b, 2000) to account for the full range of regional nationalist political behaviour. This design effectively permits us to ask a central question: what incites nations to move from one type of contention to another? The findings confirm that, as the configuration of motivating factors in a community changes, organizations acting within that community do respond to the altered incentives and changing political context by moving up and down the ‘ladder of contention’. The findings thus suggest an under-explored ‘strategic dynamism’ in force in ethnonational communities. In capturing this dynamic movement, our framework allows for a better understanding of which features of a group’s environment tend to have an ‘escalatory’ impact on conflict (especially repression), and which others have a generally ‘ameliorative’ effect (e.g., economic transfers).

Status Quo Preferences and Disputes Short of War

This paper suggests that the importance of preferences for the international order extend beyond the conditions proposed by power transition theory. Specifically, a dissimilarity of preferences for the international order should affect relations for all states in the international system for all levels of dispute. In essence, I posit that disagreements over the norms and rules that comprise the international order should increase the domain of conflict for all dyads—even when they have neither the ability nor opportunity to directly affect the construction of the international order. To test the above argument, I propose two new Euclidean-distance measures of dissimilarities of economic and security preferences. Using a series of logits and their predicted probabilities on data from the post-World War II period, I find that a dissimilarity of preferences for the status quo has an important, incendiary effect on the likelihood of dyadic disputes short of war. In fact, dissimilar preferences for the economic and security status quo provide greater leverage in explaining disputes short of war than even such traditionally important variables as the lowest level of dyadic democracy and economic interdependence.