Executive Constraints and Civil Conflict Onset
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Executive Constraints and Civil Conflict Onset J.L.A. Krusell Master’s Thesis Spring 2020 Department of Peace and Conflict Research Supervisor: Kristine Eck Word Count: 15000 Abstract: Do institutional constraints on a regime’s executive decrease the likelihood of civil conflict onset? An unconstrained executive is free to loot state resources undermining the state’s capacity to effectively deal with nascent rebellions, and may be more likely to engage in violent repression, especially in the form of indiscriminate violence. This can encourage political grievances, lead to a loss of legitimacy for the regime, and provide the opportunity for would be rebel groups to attract new members by offering protection against government violence. Furthermore, the lack of guaranteed checks to executive power may incentivise actors to avoid bargained solutions if they fear future extralegal retributions. Taken together, where there is a lack of effective constraints against the executive there may be an increased riskfor the onset of civil conflict. To test this proposition I employ a bayesian latent variable model which estimates executive constraint as a latent factor derived from several manifest variables and relate it to a binary measure of civil conflict onset through a logistic regression. The primary finding is that there is a negative relationship such that the predicted probability for civil conflict is lower where there exists higher levels of executive constraints. However, this is conditional on the level of GDP per capita; for low-income country-years the relationship between executive constraints and civil conflict onset is indeterminate possibly because it is easier to recruit and mobilize fighters in such settings regardless of the overall level of executive constraints. The model, however, is a poor fit to the data meaning that the presented results should be considered tentative at best. Nonetheless, this study helps to further the work on examining specific political institutions as potential risk factors for the onset ofcivil conflict. Contents Introduction 4 Theoretical Background 7 Political Institutions . 7 Executive Constraints and Civil Conflict . 14 Empirics 18 Research Design . 18 Results . 33 Alternative Specifications . 51 Conclusion 55 Appendices 58 Stan Code . 58 References 63 3 Introduction Since the end of World War II, civil conflict has been the most prevalent form of state-based conflict. Of the 286 conflicts recorded by the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database v19.1 (Gleditsch et al. 2002; Pettersson, Högbladh, andÖberg 2019) for the years covering 1946 until 2018, 217 of those, or approximately 75.9 percent, are classified as intrastate. These civil conflicts are distributed across 106 countries, more than half of which having experienced at least one major civil war with 1,000 battle deaths at a minimum. Where data is available, civil conflicts are also empirically among the deadliest. Out of 1,607,926 cumulative battles deaths from organized violence recorded since 1989 (Pettersson, Högbladh, and Öberg 2019; Eck and Hultman 2007; Sundberg, Eck, and Kreutz 2012), 79.3 percent are the result of civil conflict. Given the impact of civil conflict and the increasing availability of conflict related data, the last several decades have witnessed a veritable explosion in the number of quantitative studies investigating the causes of civil conflict (Blattman and Miguel 2010). Scholars have proposed numerous theories ranging from motivation-based arguments — such as, for example, the role of horizontal inequalities and ethnic identities (Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011) — to opportunity-based explanations centered on economic factors (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Collier, Hoeffler, and Rohner 2009) as well as the political and structural conditions underlying state weakness (Hegre et al. 2001; Fearon and Laitin 2003). This latter strain of research in particular has spurred extensive work into examining the distinguishing features of 4 weak states and whether political institutions play a significant role in the risk of civil conflict. Several studies have argued in favor of institutions and have investigated, for example, aspects of governance, institutional quality, and opportunities for political participation as factors influencing the risk of civil conflict (Fjelde and DeSoysa 2009; Taydas, Peksen, and James 2010; Hegre and Nygård 2015; Bartusevičius and Skaaning 2018). This paper extends that work by taking a disaggregated approach to studying political institutions by focusing specifically on the effect of executive constraints on therisk of civil conflict onset. The motivation to focus on executive constraints is two-fold: first, the executive is often times one of the key decision-makers in a state’s regime. Institutions that provide a check against the types of actions which may exacerbate the risk of rebellion should be relevant to the study of civil conflict. Such an approach can further our understanding of how specific political institutions may shape the incentives for violence by affecting state behaviour. Second, the link between executive constraints and civil conflict is relatively understudied. The previous literature that exists is fairly limited and contradictory in terms of results. To study the potential link between executive constraints and civil conflict onset I use a bayesian latent variable model to estimate executive constraints as a latent factor drawn from the basis of several observed manifest variables. I then relate this measure to a binary indicator for civil conflict onset using a cross-country time series logistic regression. The principle finding is that there is tentative evidence that executive constraints do matter and that there is a negative relationship between the latent level of constraints on the executive and the risk of civil conflict onset. However, this relationship largely disappears for low-income country-years when an interaction term between executive constraints and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is included. If the primary theoretical mechanism involves the impact of executive constraints on rebel mobilization — an unchecked executive may be more likely to engage in indiscriminate 5 violence which could lead to a loss of legitimacy as well as the ability of rebel groups to offer local security guarantees to attract recruits — then the incentives for violence in low-income country-years due to say economic factors may be so great that it does not matter how constrained the executive may or may not be. We should not be overconfident with these results, however. Similar to most other studies examining conflict onset, the presented models are a poor fit to the underlying data. Modeling civil conflict is a difficult task, especially when trying tocapture the dynamics of conflict with a standard time series cross-country regression. The results will require verification by additional studies using alternative methodological approaches. In what follows, a deeper justification for why political institutions are relevant tothe study of civil conflict together with an overview of related empirical literature will be presented. The theoretical mechanisms linking executive constraints to conflict onset will then be discussed followed by a presentation of the paper’s research design and empirical analysis, including both the latent variable measurement model for executive constraints and the cross-country time series logistic regression predicting civil conflict onset. The final section provides conclusions and possible suggestions for future research. 6 Theoretical Background Political Institutions This paper takes as a starting premise a definition of institutions as being “systems of established and embedded social rules that structure social interactions” (Hodgson 2006). More informally, we can consider them to be the “rules of the game”, encom- passing, for example, codified laws, norms, and shared understandings, all of which can constrain or enable behaviour by influencing the perceptions and preferences of actors through incentives and deterrents.1 Furthermore, over time, the habits formed from these systems create expectations of stable patterns of behaviour thereby further shaping the interactions between actors by reducing uncertainty (North 1990). Although there is a wide variety of institutions, the present focus will be on the type of institutions which govern political behaviour. This exposition is relevant to the study of civil conflict for both motivation-based and opportunity-based explanatory accounts. To the extent that the onset of civil conflict is a longer process featuring waves of escalation and de-escalation rather than a single one-off event (Florea 2012; Sambanis 2004), institutions are a key influence onthe 1None of which is meant to imply that institutions stand external to actor perceptions and preferences as unchanging features. Rather, institutions are social constructs subject to changing normative values and able to be reinforced or undermined by behavioural feedback loops. This latter point is especially interesting within the context of civil conflict considering how the development of various institutions and conflict incidence can by jointly determined; however, it remains outside the scope of this paper. 7 constitutive interactions between state and non-state actors. For example, they can shift the opportunity costs of violence altering the mobilization capacity of would be rebel groups. Institutions can