Chapter 4: Political Violence

A prince ought to have two fears, one from within, on account of his subjects, the other from without, on account of external powers.

- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513.

Niccolo Machiavelli. Wikimedia Commons

In Chapters 2 and 3 we developed a framework for analyzing how the extractive and productive capabilities of the state are built, with particular emphasis on investments in fiscal and legal capacity.

Politics certainly played an important role in that argument, but we modeled the forces of politics by two simple parameters, capturing the nature (cohesiveness) of political institutions and the rate of political turnover (stability). Although analytically useful, this approach kept the mechanisms for resolving political conflicts in the background. It is now time to explore these issues in more detail.

Our purpose in this chapter is to take a first step towards a better understanding of the observed clustering of development with political violence. Studying the causes of political violence is important in and of itself. So we begin by isolating the likely determinants of internal political violence, drawing on - and extending - the existing literature. Furthermore, political violence closely ties in with our previous modeling in at least two ways.

First, the theory in Chapters 2 and 3 suggests that the risk of external violence, i.e., the risk of war, can promote state building by enhancing common interests relative to redistributive interests across different groups in society. The risk of internal political violence appears to be rather different. Conditions that sow the seeds for internal violence are hardly a sign of common interests but of an extreme form of redistributive struggle across domestic groups. Intuitively, the risk of internal political violence may therefore drive incentives for state building in a different direction than the risk of external violence. Thus, we might expect the incumbent's two fears, highlighted by Machiavelli in the quote above, to be associated with different consequences for state-capacity investments.

Second, the theory that we have proposed suggests that political instability may be an important hurdle for investments in the state, especially outside the realm of common-interest states (recall the stability condition). Manifestations of political violence such as insurgencies and civil wars are important determinants of political instability in countries where they take place.

For both of these reasons, it is essential to explore the determinants of political violence both theoretically and empirically the main goal of this chapter.