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Economics of Governance

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29.12.2016 | Original Paper

Within-group heterogeneity and civil war

verfasst von: Nobuhiro Mizuno, Ryosuke Okazawa

Erschienen in: Economics of Governance | Ausgabe 2/2017

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Abstract

This study offers a bargaining model of conflict in which the government offers a transfer to an opposition group to preclude civil war. Members of the opposition are heterogeneous in income and ideology, and heterogeneity generates disagreement about whether to accept the government’s offer. We assume that the probability that the government’s offer will preclude conflict increases continuously with the number of opposition group members who agree to accept it. When within-group heterogeneity is large, the number of members who are receptive to the government’s offer is less responsive to an increase in the transfer level. In this situation, the government must substantially increase its transfer to attract the support of the opposition. Subsequently, as peace becomes more costly for the government, negotiations are likely to break down.

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See, for example, Rodrik (1999) and Cerra and Saxena (2008).

Using the quantity of rainfall as an instrument, Miguel et al. (2004) show that poverty exerts causal effects on the risks of civil war.

Bueno de Mesquita (2005) presents a model in which an opposition group comprises moderates and extremists, which is similar to this study in the sense that within-group heterogeneity of political preferences are explicitly analyzed. Unlike this study, however, Bueno de Mesquita (2005) does not analyze how increasing heterogeneity affects negotiation outcomes.

This mechanism is similar to the probabilistic voting model (Lindbeck and Weibull 1987; Dixit and Londregan 1996; Persson and Tabellini 2000).

The following formulation is based on Jackson and Morelli (2007) and is similar to many studies on the bargaining model of conflict (see, among others, Fearon 1995; Powell 1999, 2002).

The process by which the decisions by the opposition group members are aggregated into the group-wide decision will be explained below.

We assume \(C \le 1-D\) to ensure that the winner cannot deprive more amounts of the loser’s resources than the remaining amounts after conflict.

Of course, whether the opposition group decides to wage civil war when \(T=0\) will depend upon the decision-making rule.

From Assumption 1, \(-C(W_{O}+W_{G})<\bar{\pi }\). Hence, when \(\pi _{m} \ge \bar{\pi }\), civil war is always precluded through negotiation. Note that when \(\pi _{m} \ge \bar{\pi }\), the transfer the government must offer to preclude conflict does not exceed that which it must offer the group welfare maximizer.

In their theoretical analysis of the relationship between inequality and economic growth, Persson and Tabellini (1994) also interpret a smaller gap between the median and the mean incomes as being indicative of a more equal income distribution. Moreover, the available data indicate a close relationship between the median–mean ratio of income and the Gini coefficient. According to UNU-WIDER (2015), the cross-country relationship between the median–mean ratio and the Gini coefficient is close to a perfect negative correlation: the correlation coefficient between them in 2010 is −0.93, which is statistically significant at the 1% level.

Note that the larger \(\pi _i\) is, the more a member i in the opposition group will prefer peace to conflict.

Similar risk–return tradeoffs appear in the bargaining model of conflict with asymmetric information (see Powell 1999). In a model featuring information asymmetry, the probability of peace is less responsive to the change in transfer amounts when there is great uncertainty about the opponent’s military technology. In contrast, this study shows that support for peace negotiations is less responsive to a change in transfer amounts when within-group heterogeneity is large.

Since \(R(n_0)>0\), \(p^{\prime }>0\), and \(p(n_0)R(n_0) \ge 0\), p(n)R(n) takes a positive value if n is sufficiently close to \(n_0\). Thus, making p(n)R(n) nonpositive is suboptimal for the government.

Assuming the constant elasticity of p(n) is not crucial to our argument. Even if the elasticity of p(n) were to depend on n, an increase in \(\xi \) shifts the graph of elasticity of the peace surplus upward, but does not change the graph of the elasticity of p(n). Therefore, \(n^*\) would decrease as heterogeneity in the opposition group increases, as long as an interior solution is guaranteed.

This example was suggested by an anonymous referee. We greatly appreciate his or her valuable comments.

One can easily check for the same relationship when antagonism toward the government correlates negatively with income level.

Some empirical studies investigate the determinants of support for terrorism. While Krueger and Male c̆ ková (2003) show that there is no evidence that the poor support and engage in terrorism, Shafiq and Sinno (2010) and Mousseau (2011) show that the relationship between individual income and support for violence varies across countries. Although support for violence as used in these studies—which is based on individual survey data—does not necessarily coincide with the taste for conflict in our model, this evidence does not indicate that the rich tend to have a strong taste for conflict.

See Jackson and Morelli (2007) for similar discussion.

That is, we assume \(\sigma =1\).

Note that \(\tilde{\pi }(T)\) is decreasing in T.

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Titel: Within-group heterogeneity and civil war
verfasst von: Nobuhiro Mizuno
Ryosuke Okazawa
Publikationsdatum: 29.12.2016
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Erschienen in: Economics of Governance / Ausgabe 2/2017
Print ISSN: 1435-6104
Elektronische ISSN: 1435-8131
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-016-0189-x