Choosing Targets and Tactics

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Choosing Targets and Tactics

How Horizontal Inequality Spurs Conflict

Solveig Hillesund

PhD Dissertation

Department of Political Science Faculty of Social Sciences

University of Oslo

February 2019

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© Solveig Hillesund, 2019

Series of dissertations submitted to the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Oslo No. 750

ISSN 1564-3991

reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission.

Cover: Hanne Baadsgaard Utigard.

Print production: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo.

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Abstract

Ethnic wars constitute more than half the civil wars in the post war period. Ethnic and cultural differences between people do not cause conflict per se, but the risk of war increases when they coincide with socioeconomic and political inequalities; that is, when horizontal (inter-group) inequalities are rife. Yet, the mechanisms that link horizontal inequalities to conflict remain underexplored.

My main claim in this dissertation is that different combinations of economic and political relative group deprivation have different implications for conflict. Because different constellations of deprivation come with different opportunities to succeed with alternative conflict strategies, they influence the choices group leaders make between targets and tactics; and thus what form of conflict is most likely to break out. Group disadvantages affect individual choices of tactics as well; in part through group leader decisions, but also more directly.

To investigate group leader choices, I analyze the onset of civil and communal conflict among politically relevant groups in Africa, and the onset of violent and nonviolent conflict among socially relevant groups around the world. Economic disadvantages alone primarily increase the risk of communal violence; political disadvantages alone increase the risk of nonviolent conflict targeting the government; and combined disadvantages increase the risk of violence against the government. This is due to differences in opportunity structure: different constellations of deprivation come with differences in elite incentives, economic leverage, the ability to blame the government, and the ability to achieve redistribution without government involvement; all of which affect the viability of the different forms of conflict.

To investigate the link between group and individual level dynamics, I introduce survey data from the West Bank and Gaza, and twenty-five African countries. I show that economic group disadvantages increase the risk that individual group members prefer violent over nonviolent tactics, especially if their group is politically excluded. The relationship is not driven solely by the individuals within the groups that have the lowest individual opportunity cost.

This dissertation contributes to the conflict literature by: (i) studying alternative forms of conflict together; by (ii) accounting for how different constellations of deprivation come with different opportunity structures, which facilitate alternative forms of conflict; by (iii) introducing data on individuals to bridge the group and individual levels of analysis; by (iv) extending the analysis of horizontal inequality beyond politically relevant ethnic groups, to ease concerns about selection bias; and by (v) accounting for a potentially important confounder: peripheral group location.

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IV

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Part I: Introduction

1 Investigating the Link Between Relative Group Deprivation and Conflict ... 3

1.1 Introduction ... 3

1.1.1 Central concepts ... 5

1.2 Literature and motivation ... 6

1.2.1 Underlying mechanisms ... 8

1.2.2 Knowledge gaps and research questions ... 10

1.3 Theoretical framework ... 12

1.3.1 Basic assumptions ... 13

1.3.2 Choosing targets and tactics ... 14

1.3.3 The role of the individual ... 16

1.4 Empirical approach ... 18

1.4.1 Data and measurement ... 18

1.4.2 Empirical scope ... 20

1.4.3 Threats to causal inference ... 21

1.4.4 Evaluating the evidence: p-values, probabilities and prediction ... 22

1.5 Research ethics ... 23

1.6 Overview of the articles ... 23

1.6.1 Part II: Opportunity structure and conflict type (Article 1 and 2) ... 24

1.6.2 Part III: In search of micro foundations (Article 3 and 4) ... 25

1.7 Conclusions and implications ... 26

1.7.1 Future research ... 30

1.8 References ... 32

Part II: Opportunity Strucutre and Conflict Type

2 Choosing Whom to Target: Horizontal Inequality and the Risk of Civil and Communal Violence ... 45

2.1 Horizontal inequality and violent conflict ... 49

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2.2 Different inequalities, different targets ... 50

2.2.1 Defining civil and communal conflicts ... 50

2.2.2 Targets that allow for redistribution ... 51

2.2.3 Targets that facilitate blame assignment ... 53

2.2.4 When economic and political inequalities coincide ... 55

2.3 Research design ... 56

2.4 Results ... 57

2.5 Robustness ... 62

2.6 Illustrations and limitations ... 63

2.7 Conclusions ... 66

3 Choosing Tactics: Horizontal Inequality and the Risk of Violent and Nonviolent Conflict ... 75

3.2 Overcoming the collective action problem: Elite motivation and blame assignment 78 3.3 Choosing tactics: Economic and political leverage ... 81

3.5 Results ... 88

Part III: In Search of Micro Foundations

4 A Dangerous Discrepancy: Testing the Micro-Dynamics of Horizontal Inequality on Palestinian Support for Armed Resistance ... 103

4.2 Horizontal inequality and the opportunity-grievance literature ... 106

4.3 Case selection ... 107

4.4 Participation versus support for violent and nonviolent collective action ... 108

4.5 Conceptualizing horizontal inequality in the West Bank and Gaza ... 109

4.7 Empirical analysis... 112

4.8 Predictive power and robustness ... 115

4.9 Conclusion ... 115

5 Choosing Violence over Demonstrations: Micro Foundations of Horizontal Inequality and Conflict ... 121

5.2 Horizontal inequality and protest: Bridging the micro and meso level ... 124

5.2.1 Types of inequality and conflict ... 125

5.2.2 Group member incentives ... 126

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VII

5.2.3 Group leader incentives ... 129

5.2.4 Alternative explanations: Efficacy, opportunity cost, and changes over time . 130 5.3 Research design ... 131

5.4 Results ... 134

Appendices

Appendix to Chapter 1 ... 151

Appendix to Chapter 2 (Article 1) ... 157

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IX

Acknowledgements

A long list of people have contributed to this dissertation. First and foremost, I want to thank my supervisors: Scott Gates and Håvard Mokleiv Nygård. Håvard has been my supervisor for the best part of eight years; throughout my bachelor thesis, master thesis, and PhD dissertation.

At each fork in the road, the one thing I knew for sure was that if I continued down the research path, I wanted Håvard to be my supervisor. Needless to say, he has had a profound impact on the researcher I have become. He was the one who first encouraged me to apply for a PhD.

Without him, this dissertation might never have seen the light of day. Scott has been my go-to person at Blindern. His door is always open (when he is in the country). He has been an inval- uable discussion partner and an inexhaustible source of interesting anecdotes. Scott and Håvard have provided me with excellent guidance, on both substantial and practical matters. They have given me valuable feedback every step of the way; encouraging me to make my claims bolder, and helping me rein in my inner perfectionist when necessary.

Several institutions, and the people in them, have contributed to this dissertation. The De- partment of Political Science at the University of Oslo has shaped my development as a political scientist for the best part of the last decade. Tore Wig, Jon Hovi, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Bjørn Høyland, Vibeke Wøien Hansen, Helge Holtermann, Håvard Strand, Staffan Kumlin, Knut- Andreas Christophersen, Øivind Bratberg, Anne Julie Semb, and Jostein Askim, as well as the dedicated participants in the eighth floor 11.30 lunches, deserve special mention. Luckily, I did not embark on the PhD journey alone. Thanks to Silje, Andreas H., Atle, Andreas, Inga, Kjersti, Vilde, Ida, Peter, Øyvind, Tarald, Haakon, Martin, Torbjørg, Karl, Eirin, Simen, and the other PhD candidates, for making this a less lonely experience! I am forever indebted to Kjersti Skarstad and Vilde Hernes, for making these last years so much more fun, and for sharing all my ups and downs, in the workplace and outside it.

After spending a semester in the UCL Department of Political Science, I am deeply grateful to Kristin M. Bakke and Nils Metternich, and the researchers in the incredible Conflict and Change group, for challenging and rewarding discussions; and to Tatjana, Luca, Giulio, Kasim, Philipp, and all the inhabitants of the PhD office, for making my stay in London so much more fun than it would have been without you! I also want to thank researchers and staff at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), for welcoming me at several stages in my project; the members of the Research School on Peace and Conflict, led by the inspiring Lynn P. Nygaard; Charles Butcher and colleagues at the NTNU; and researchers and staff at Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, where I worked as a research assistant while I was writing the third article in this dissertation, using Fafo survey data.

This thesis would not have been possible without my amazing family and friends. A special thanks to my mother, my sister Ingrid, and my friend Pia, for listening patiently over the years, no matter how mundane, or impenetrably complex, the subject. Finally, I want to thank Bjørnar.

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You have remained almost blissfully ignorant about the details of my project (having been ru- mored at one point to claim I worked as a nurse to avoid having to explain what I do for a living), while supporting me in every possible way. Thank you for encouraging me, and for giving me perspective on the things that really matter in life (some of them are actually outside academia). I could not wish for a better man to share my life with!

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Part I

Introduction

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1 Investigating the Link Between

Relative Group Deprivation and Conflict

1.1 Introduction

Ethnic wars constitute more than half the civil wars in the post war period.¹ This has led to fierce debate over the role of ethnic grievances: are they the central cause of civil war, or a convenient cover story for self-interested rebels? Our understanding of the causes of ethnic war has been improved by research showing that ethnic differences increase the risk of civil war when they coincide with economic and political differences (horizontal inequalities). Yet the mechanisms that link horizontal inequalities to conflict remain underexplored. This dissertation highlights four critical gaps in the literature that warrant more attention: (i) alternative conflict strategies and the corresponding forms that ethnic conflict can take;² (ii) the different opportunity structures that different constellations of horizontal inequality come with; (iii) the link between group and individual level dynamics; and (iv) potential group selection bias.

My main claim is that different combinations of economic and political relative group deprivation have different implications for conflict. Because different constellations of deprivation come with different opportunities to succeed with alternative conflict strategies, they influence the choices group leaders make between targets and tactics, and thus what form of conflict is most likely to break out. They also influence the tactical choices of individual group members.

To investigate the claims, I adopt a two-pronged strategy. Part II uses datasets on ethnic groups to investigate group leaders’ strategic choices. Part III introduces survey data, to investigate the link between group and individual level dynamics, and control for alternative explanations.

To understand when and why civil war breaks out, we need to study different forms of conflict together; using analytical models that can account for the choices between targets and tactics. In most large-N analyses of the causes of civil war, the zero (‘no war’) category conflates situations with no collective agency with situations where the agency takes a nonviolent, communal or less organized or intense form; and most studies of other forms of conflict do not account for civil war. Yet, to distinguish the determinants of general mobilization from those of conflict strategy, civil wars and other forms of conflict should be accounted for within the same empirical models. The few studies that do this, tend to look at geographically delimited units.

1This conclusion is consistent across figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) (Pettersson and Eck 2018), mapped to ethnic groups via the ACD2EPR dataset (Wucherpfennig et al. 2012), and several other datasets(Bartusevičius 2016, 98). The ethnic component is strongest in conflicts over territory, but also present in between a third and half of disputes over government (Bartusevičius 2016, 98, Denny and Walter 2014).

2I use the term “strategy” to refer to both the choice between targets (government vs. other groups) and between tactics (violent vs. nonviolent); whereas “tactics” refers to the distinction between violent and nonviolent methods.

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The first two articles in this dissertation, on the other hand, study different forms of conflict together, while also adopting an ethnic group level perspective; because identity groups are the central actors in horizontal inequality theory.

Part II shows that different constellations of relative group disadvantage spur different forms of conflict. The first article analyzes the onset of civil and communal conflict among politically relevant ethnic groups in Africa. The second article investigates the onset of violent and nonviolent conflict targeting the government among socially relevant groups around the world. To- gether, they demonstrate that economic disadvantages alone primarily increase the risk of communal violence; political disadvantages alone increase the risk of nonviolent conflict targeting the government; and combined disadvantages increase the risk of violence against the government. I attribute this to differences in opportunity structure; concerning elite incentives, government blame, economic leverage and the ability achieve redistribution without government involvement. This calls for renewed attention to the interaction between grievance and opportunity explanations.

Analyses of horizontal inequality and conflict tend to be restricted to politically relevant ethnic groups, raising concerns about selection bias. My findings on conflicts that target the government extend to the wider category of socially relevant ethnic groups, however; suggesting these concerns may be overstated. The findings have important implications for policy. If policy makers aim to reduce the most damaging form of conflict – civil war – priority should be given to improving the economic situation of ethnic groups that are both economically and politically deprived.

Part III responds to the dearth of studies on the interplay between group and individual level mechanisms of mobilization, by measuring conflict with survey data. The third article measures individual support for violent and nonviolent resistance in the West Bank and Gaza. The fourth article measures participation in political violence and demonstrations in 25 African countries.

Both support the claim that economic disadvantage increases the risk that political violence is chosen over nonviolent tactics; in particular among the politically disadvantaged. The individuals’ choice of violence is explained in part by their leaders’ strategic choices, but also individual level dynamics; like the emotional rewards they expect from violence. Critics of horizontal inequality explanations might argue that the relationship is driven solely by the individuals in each group that have the lowest opportunity cost. The individual level data allow me to establish that this is not the case.

This introductory chapter proceeds by defining central concepts; before reviewing the literature on horizontal inequality and conflict and presenting my research questions (Section 1.2).

I then present an overarching theoretical framework (Section 1.3); discuss central challenges that concern research design (Section 1.4) and ethics (Section 1.5); and present the results from the four research articles (dissertation chapters) that make up the main body of the dissertation (Section 1.6).³ I conclude by discussing how the articles combine to help answer the research questions; and their implications for policy and future research (Section 1.7).

3What I refer to as Article 1 is presented in Chapter 2, Article 2 in Chapter 3, Article 3 in Chapter 4, and Article 4 in Chapter 5.

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1.1.1 Central concepts

This dissertation uses the consensus definition of civil war from the quantitative conflict literature: violent clashes between a government and an organized non-state actor over an incom- patibility concerning government or territory. It is distinguished from one-sided violence in that both sides are organized. The PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conflict Dataset (Gleditsch et al. 2002) makes the definition operational by adding a severity criterion: that the fighting resulted 25 or more battle-related deaths a year.⁴ For a discussion of the conceptual and empirical complexities of civil war definitions, see Sambanis (2004).

Conflict researchers are beginning to recognize that to understand conflict processes, and the use of violence, we must understand when actors manage their incompatibilities with alternative strategies (Gleditsch, Metternich, and Ruggeri 2014, 308). To define conflict, more generally, I extend the definition to account for two alternative strategies: conflicts fought between ethnic groups without involving the government (communal conflicts) and conflicts fought with nonviolent means. The more specific conflict definitions in the four articles can be subsumed under the general definition collective action where ordinary people join forces to challenge the status quo outside conventional political channels; which draws on Tarrow’s definition of contentious action (Tarrow 2011, 6-9). This covers violent and nonviolent, large- and small-scale, sustained and short-lived collective action over all claims and across different levels of organization. The definition encompasses, but is not restricted to, political violence and protest.⁵ Conflict, thus defined, can either replace or complement conventional (routine) political activity, like voting and interest group affiliation, as a strategy for managing incompatibilities. Certain actors, like political parties, can be important for both. I use the terms nonviolent conflict, nonviolent protest, nonviolent contentious action, nonviolent resistance, and nonviolent tactics interchangea- bly.

Horizontal inequality⁶ is the unequal distribution of a resource between strong identity groups in society. The term was coined by Frances Stewart (2002, 2008b) to distinguish inequality between groups from inequality between individuals, sometimes called vertical inequality. The latter comes closer to what most people think of when they hear inequality; the kind the Gini coefficient captures.

Horizontal inequality is a multidimensional concept (Stewart 2002, Østby 2013). The inequalities can be economic (in income, wealth, land, etc.), social (in education, health care, etc.), political (in political participation, executive power, etc.) or cultural (in recognition of symbols, dress, language, etc.). This dissertation highlights the economic and political dimensions, and the interaction between them. Different operational definitions also compare different identity groups. The groups can be demarcated by language, race, religion, region, or migrant status, but they must be salient: individuals must identify strongly with them. I follow the majority of horizontal inequality research in restricting the analysis to groups demarcated by ethnicity, defined in the Weberian sense (Weber 1946), as a ‘subjectively experienced sense of communality

4Some researchers restrict the term war to conflicts with a 1000 deaths or more.

5While this is a broad definition, it is narrower than definitions of conflict as incompatible interests or claims, as the latter may not manifest in observable conflict behavior.

6Synonyms include inter-group inequality and ethnic inequality.

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based on the belief in common ancestry and shared culture’ (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, 23). The most important ethnic markers are race, language and religion. Which of the multiple ethnic groups in a country are salient enough to include in cross-country analyses is an empirical question. The most common, and contested, selection criterion is political relevance; that is, that the group is represented in the national political arena or actively discriminated against (Vogt et al. 2015). In Section 1.4.2, I discuss the consequences of using this criterion in two of my articles, and how I move beyond it to test for potential selection bias in another.

1.2 Literature and motivation

The idea that unequal societies are prone to conflict has a long intellectual trajectory (see Gurr 1970, Davies 1962). Yet, early large-N cross-national investigations provided mixed and inconclusive evidence. They found both positive and negative linear associations, no association, and curvilinear relationships between inequality and political instability (for an overview, see Østby 2013, Bahgat et al. 2017). In the early 2000s, seminal studies of the causes of civil war (Fearon and Laitin 2003, Collier and Hoeffler 2004) improved on previous samples and measures, but found no evidence that unequal countries, as measured by the Gini index, face a higher risk of civil war.

Other grievance explanations suffered a similar fate. The evidence on the relationship between ethnic diversity and civil war was inconclusive (Østby 2008b, Fearon and Laitin 2003, Collier and Hoeffler 2004, Reynal-Querol 2002, Ellingsen 2000, Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005, Sambanis 2001, Hegre et al. 2001). While ethnic wars made up a large share of civil conflicts, the mainstream view was that their causes did not differ from the causes of non-ethnic war (Fearon 2006, Fearon and Laitin 2003). Ethnic grievance was not a central cause of war, but a mobilizing tool or cover story for self-interested rebels. Thus, in the early 2000s, many scholars considered the debate that pitted grievance against resource and opportunity explanations resolved; and turned to opportunity explanations, like low state capacity, rough terrain and low opportunity costs.

Their rejection of inequality and grievance was premature. A case-based literature was link- ing inequality between ethnic groups to political violence around the world; based on the prem- ise that inequality is group-centered and multidimensional (Stewart 2002, 2008a). This helped prompt a turn in the quantitative literature; towards the realization that inequalities and ethnic cleavages can be plausible explanations for group phenomena like ethnic conflict; provided that they coincide (horizontal inequalities) (Murshed and Gates 2005, Østby 2008b, Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011). Previous studies had missed the target with their focus on inequality between individuals and ethnic differences per se.

The conceptual and empirical shift towards horizontal inequality that followed prompted a range of large-N studies that link inequality to civil war.⁷ Economic inequality between ethnic

7This section reviews the literature on economic and political inequality between groups defined along ethnic lines. For more comprehensive reviews of the literature on inequality and armed conflict, see Østby (2013), Bahgat et al. (2017) and Hillesund et al. (2018). Studies of inequality between groups defined along non-ethnic lines tend to find it increases conflict; most notably for differences between sub-national regions (Østby, Nordås, and Rød

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groups was found to increase the risk of civil war across countries (Østby 2008b, a, Buhaug, Cederman, and Gleditsch 2014, Siroky and Hechter 2016, Gubler and Selway 2012) and sub- national regions (Vadlamannati 2011, Nepal, Bohara, and Gawande 2011); and in ethnic group level analyses that measured ethnic groups’ position within their counties’ economic distribution, rather than summarize the distribution itself (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, Cederman, Weidmann, and Bormann 2015, Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011, Cunningham 2013b). The group level analyses distinguish between groups that are relatively deprived and relatively privileged. Both have been hypothesized to increase the risk of conflict.

This thesis investigates relative group deprivation, for which the evidence is strong. The results are less conclusive for relative privilege.

The exclusion of politically relevant groups from executive power increases the risk of civil war (Buhaug, Cederman, and Gleditsch 2014, Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, Cederman, Weidmann, and Bormann 2015, Cederman, Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011, Cederman, Wimmer, and Min 2010, Wimmer, Cederman, and Min 2009, Raleigh 2014, Siroky and Hechter 2016, Deiwiks, Cederman, and Gleditsch 2012, Asal et al. 2016, Wucherpfennig, Hunziker, and Cederman 2016); as does the relative political deprivation of ethnic minorities, more generally (Regan and Norton 2005, Vadlamannati 2011, Gurr 1993b).⁸ Finally, studies that use a dummy variable to flag state-led discrimination in either the political or economic realm have found it is associated with large-scale violence (Butcher and Svensson 2016), and that it is one of very few variables from the conflict literature that actually contribute to our ability to predict civil war (Goldstone et al. 2010).⁹

The risk of civil war could be at its highest when different forms of deprivation coincide.

Both quantitative (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, 111, Cederman, Weidmann, and Bormann 2015) and qualitative studies (Langer 2005, Ukiwo 2008, Caumartin, Molina, and Thorp 2008, Langer 2008) show that economic relative deprivation spurs civil conflict primarily among groups that are excluded from or underrepresented in executive power. More research is needed on this interaction, as I will get back to in Section 1.2.2.

Recent research suggests that socioeconomic and political horizontal inequalities can influence conflicts other than civil war; from different forms of political violence (Cao et al. 2018), like terrorism (Choi and Piazza 2016, Piazza 2012, Hansen, Nemeth, and Mauslein forthcoming), non-state conflict (Rudolfsen 2017) and election violence (Fjelde and Höglund 2016), to more general social unrest (De Juan and Wegner forthcoming, Murshed, Badiuzzaman, and Hasan 2018). Of particular interest to this investigation are studies of communal and nonviolent conflict. For communal violence, the evidence is mixed. Two studies suggest a positive relationship with inequality between ethnic groups; for inequality in assets,

2009, Deiwiks, Cederman, and Gleditsch 2012, Lessmann 2016, Murshed and Gates 2005, Ezcurra and Palacios 2016) and between rural-urban migrants and non-migrants in large cities (Østby 2016). The evidence for social horizontal inequality is somewhat less conclusive than for economic and political inequality (Østby 2008b, a, 2016, Østby, Nordås, and Rød 2009, Murshed and Gates 2005).

8Gurr (1993b) finds a positive relationship on the group level for a measure of political differentials, but a puzzling negative relationship with his political discrimination index. His regression incorporates very few control variables, however, and includes both political deprivation measures in the same model.

9The latter studies use Minorities at Risk (MAR) data (Minorities at Risk Project 2009), which have been criticised for their potential bias due to the selection of groups (see e.g. Hug 2013). In Section 1.4.3 I discuss similar criti- cisms of the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data commonly used to measure political exclusion.

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education and political exclusion in developing countries (Fjelde and Østby 2014), and inequality in infant mortality rates between religious groups in Indonesia (Mancini 2008). In Africa, however, Raleigh (2014) finds no effect of economic inequality between geographic grid cells, and a negative effect of political exclusion; and Atiku-Abubakar and Shaw-Taylor (2003) find no effect of political or economic differences between a country’s ethnic groups. Yet, many case-based studies link horizontal inequalities to political violence short of civil war (Langer 2005, Stewart 2008b, 2002).

The evidence is equally mixed for nonviolent conflict. A country’s risk of large-scale nonviolent conflict may (Butcher and Svensson 2016) or may not (Butcher and Svensson 2016, Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017) increase with state-led economic and political discrimination.

More generally, a country, city, ethnic group, or individual’s risk of nonviolent conflict may (Cunningham 2013b, Miodownik and Nir 2016) or may not (Gurr 1993b, Thurber 2018, Østby 2016) increase with economic disadvantage; and has been found to increase with (Miodownik and Nir 2016, Dahl et al. 2017, Cunningham 2013b, Gurr 1993b, Choi and Kim 2018), decrease with (Thurber 2018, Gurr 1993b) and remain unaltered by (Regan and Norton 2005) political disadvantage.

1.2.1 Underlying mechanisms

There is broad agreement that mechanisms of identity and grievance underpin the horizontal inequality-conflict relationship, but the best accounts also discuss opportunity. The central question is how the collective action problem (Olson 1965) is overcome: why are individuals willing to take action to provide a public good, like economic or political redistribution, when each would be better off remaining passive, provided someone else took the costs and risks of acting? Opportunity and grievance explanations of conflict offer different solutions. The former revolve around the provision of selective material incentives to the individual; the latter hold that people will act if they are sufficiently aggrieved.¹⁰ Horizontal inequality theory lies at their intersection.

The roots of the grievance explanation go back to Gurr’s (1970) influential theory about relative deprivation: people become more frustrated, and potentially aggressive, the larger the discrepancy between what they think they are able to attain and what they expect or think they deserve. When a group is relatively deprived, its members compare its situation to a better sit- uated group. For a group disadvantage to translate into a group grievance that can motivate collective action, its members must perceive their group as relatively deprived, find the disadvantage unjust, and blame an external actor, like the government (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, 37-44).

Group identity plays a pivotal role in the conflict mobilization process (Gurr 1993a, Stewart 2008b, 2002). Group identity is a precondition for translating horizontal inequalities into grievances; but grievances also influence identity. Most people have ties to many overlapping and crosscutting identity groups (Stewart 2008a, 2002), and inter-group differences in status or

10For relatively privileged groups, the motivation could be a perceived threat to their privileged position or a situation where group members believe that the state redistributes too much of their resources to other groups.

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wealth can help highlight and crystalize one identity as more important than the others (Gurr 1993a, 127). In this process, leadership can be crucial. Group leaders intent on challenging the government can facilitate grievance and identity formation, by interpreting or reinterpreting the groups’ history and current circumstances, to create a narrative that supports collective action.

This is the process of collective action framing (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, 42).

Group grievances and group identification combine to increase the opportunity to launch a rebel movement (Gurr 1993a, 45-48, 2000, 95, Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013). People who identify strongly with a group and feel it is unfairly disadvantaged are more likely to feel solidarity and anger. Group leaders can draw on these emotional resources to mobilize group members for collective action. Unlike standard opportunity explanations, which herald individual material rewards as the solution to the collective action problem, the horizontal inequality account falls within a tradition that holds that non-material and other-regarding rewards can be equally important (Weinstein 2007, Wood 2003, Petersen 2001). Participation in conflict can bring inter-personal and solidary rewards, like prestige and acceptance, among participants (Gates 2002) and in the wider group (McAdam 2010, 45); and provide pleasure in agency (Gates 2002, Wood 2003, Gurr 1970). Strong identity groups can also come with pre-existing social networks with trust and sanctioning mechanisms that aid mobilization (McAdam 2010).

Economically deprived groups’ relative lack of financial resources acts as an additional source of opportunity, in that group members with few good options outside a movement (low opportunity cost) are more susceptible to material incentives (Østby 2013, 216).¹¹ Overall, however, the collective action problem has been somewhat overstated in the context of civil war, given that it can be as costly to stay outside a rebel movements as to join one (Kalyvas and Kocher 2007).

The inequality-conflict relationship is moderated by external opportunity structures (Østby 2013, Gurr 1993a). Horizontal inequalities are more likely to translate into organized violence in areas with high population pressure (Østby et al. 2011, Hansen, Nemeth, and Mauslein forthcoming), relative wealth (Hansen, Nemeth, and Mauslein forthcoming), or natural resources (Hunziker and Cederman 2017, Asal et al. 2016); in weak states (Rudolfsen 2017, Ghatak 2018); and in democratic (Hansen, Nemeth, and Mauslein forthcoming, Østby 2008a), and majoritarian political systems (Fjelde and Höglund 2016). Choi and Kim (2018) show that in regimes with large minimum winning coalitions, political exclusion tends to spur protest and riots, while it spurs civil wars where such coalitions are small. Within-group inequality could either facilitate (Kuhn and Weidmann 2015) or impede (Siroky and Hechter 2016) the transla- tion of horizontal inequality to civil war; while linguistic segmentation and the absence of stable ethnic hierarchies in multiethnic states appear to facilitate it (Vogt 2018). Finally, state repres- sion of ethnic groups, both prior to and in response to their initial mobilization, is likely to influence their claims and tactics further down the road (see e.g. Davenport 2015). Yet it has received little systematic attention in the inequality literature (but see Lindemann and Wimmer 2018 for a qualitative comparative analysis).

The horizontal inequality literature draws heavily on social movement theory and social psy- chology. The distinction between grievance and identity formation, internal opportunities and

11Relatively privileged groups, on the other hand, face high opportunity costs, but an abundance of resources to finance rebellion.

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external opportunities outlined here mirrors the distinction between collective action framing, mobilizing structures and political opportunities in social movement explanations (McAdam 2010, Tarrow 2011). The notion that people make comparisons that hinge on ‘in’- and ‘out’- group distinctions, which link grievance to social identity, finds support in experimental psy- chology (Turner 1981, 80-84, Hogg and Abrams 1988, 22-26). For a review of the social psy- chology literature on social identity, relative deprivation and collective action see Van Zomeren, Postmes, and Spears (2008).

A few quantitative studies test the links from inequality to grievance, and grievance to conflict; mostly in Africa. They find, first, that objective and perceived inequalities are correlated (Gurr 1993b, Holmquist 2012), but subject to manipulation and misperception: not all disadvantaged groups see their disadvantage, and some well-off groups consider themselves disadvantaged (Langer and Ukiwo 2008, Langer and Smedts 2013, Rustad 2016). Second, perceptions of grievance are related to conflict. Organized violence becomes more likely in a sub- national region the higher its people consider the inequality among groups and regions (Must 2016); and when poverty and group grievances coincide (Tollefsen forthcoming). Individual level analyses add some nuance, in line with the proposed mechanisms: to perceive one’s group as disadvantaged or privileged is not enough to increase support for violence (Rustad 2016, Miodownik and Nir 2016). The situation must also be considered unjust and blamed on an external actor; usually measured by a question about the unfair treatment of one’s group by the government (Kirwin and Cho 2009, Miodownik and Nir 2016).¹²

1.2.2 Knowledge gaps and research questions

This dissertation responds to four gaps in the literature: on alternative conflict strategies, different constellations of deprivation, individual group members’ choices, and potential group selection bias.

Alternative strategies. To understand when and why civil war breaks out, we need to study different forms of conflict together; using models that can account for actors’ choices between targets and tactics. Most large-N analyses of civil war do not account for other forms of conflict.

They adopt a binary approach, where the zero (‘no war’) category conflates situations with no collective agency with situations where the agency takes a nonviolent, communal or less organized or intense form; thus missing important aspects of mobilization. Most studies of the determinants of other forms of conflict account for civil wars by reference to other studies, or in separate models. Yet, to distinguish the determinants of general mobilization from the choice of one conflict strategy over another, civil wars and other forms of conflicts must be accounted for in the same empirical models.

Horizontal inequality researchers draw on social movement and collective action theories that cover a wide range of movements. Yet, to explain civil war, specifically, horizontal inequality theory must be able to account for both the targeting of the government and the use of violent tactics, not just the overcoming of the collective action problem. The assumption that

12Koos (2018) finds no effect of unfair treatment on support for violence in the Niger Delta, but group grievance measured as unfair revenue share increases the support.

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horizontal inequality facilitates such targeting and tactics is underdeveloped in horizontal inequality theory, and has been challenged by the recent finding that while political exclusion makes the expression of incompatibilities more likely, it does not contribute to their militariza- tion (Bartusevičius and Gleditsch 2019). In addition, most existing studies of nonviolent and communal conflict that incorporate horizontal inequality variables do not account for civil war (Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017, Miodownik and Nir 2016, Regan and Norton 2005, Østby 2016, Fjelde and Østby 2014, Mancini 2008, Raleigh 2014, Atiku-Abubakar and Shaw-Taylor 2003), which precludes investigation of the choice between tactics; or they compare different forms of conflict at the country (Dahl et al. 2017, Butcher and Svensson 2016) or grid-cell (Raleigh 2014) level, instead of looking at the actors that are making the decisions. The articles in this dissertation are among the first to adopt a group level perspective while accounting for both civil war and alternative conflict strategies.¹³

Constellations of deprivation. Does it matter whether a group’s disadvantage is political, economic, or both? Previous research has paid little attention to whether and how different dimensions of horizontal inequality work together to facilitate conflict, and whether different mechanisms link different configurations of inequality to conflict. The effect of economic relative deprivation on civil war is driven primarily by ethnic groups that also experience political exclusion (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, 111, Cederman, Weidmann, and Bormann 2015), however; suggesting that overlapping cleavages matter.

Grievances are best conceptualized as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of mobilization;

and opportunities and resources combine to determine what, if any, kind of contention results from them (White et al. 2015, Cunningham et al. 2017). All forms of relative group deprivation provide potential grievances that can motivate challenges to the status quo. Different constellations come with different resources and opportunity structures, however, that influence what strategies are likely to succeed, and thus what kind of conflict group leaders should want to initiate. This is where grievance and opportunity explanations interact. In tandem with the first research gap, it motivates the first research question:

RQ 1: How do different constellations of relative group deprivation influence the risk of nonviolent and communal conflict compared to that of civil war?

Group-individual link. The micro foundations of horizontal inequality theory remain under- explored. Most studies of inequality and conflict use macro and meso level data. These are essential for establishing the relationship between inequality and conflict, and predicting the risk of conflict for a country, geographic area or group. Parts of the chain of mechanisms that is believed to link horizontal inequality to conflict can only be tested with individual level data, however. This includes assumptions about perceptions and attitudes. Importantly, rival explanations of conflict that highlight individual resources and opportunity costs can only be disen- tangled from horizontal inequality with data on the living conditions of households or individuals. Yet, micro level studies of what determines of participation in civil conflict remain few and far between (exceptions include Humphreys and Weinstein 2008, Wood 2003, Kalyvas

13Cunningham (2013b) and Thurber (2018) include horizontal inequality variables as well as both violent and nonviolent conflict in group level analyses, but are restricted to self-determination disputes and political exclusion, respectively.

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2006); as do studies of horizontal inequality and conflict that account for perceptions and attitudes in econometric analyses (Rustad 2016, Miodownik and Nir 2016, Must 2016). To my knowledge, the articles in this dissertation are the first investigations of horizontal inequality to control for opportunity cost explanations, and for individual group members’ choice between violent and nonviolent conflict strategies. The second research question responds to the need for conflict theory and analyses that bridge the group and individual level:

RQ 2: Does relative group deprivation influence individual group members’ decisions on whether to support or take part in violent or nonviolent conflict?

Potentially biased group selection. Most analyses of horizontal inequality and conflict are restricted to politically relevant ethnic groups. These are groups that are represented in the national political arena or actively discriminated against (Vogt et al. 2015). Yet, it is far from obvious that the mechanisms outlined in the literature apply to these groups only. If we aim to generalize to ethnic groups more generally, the political relevance criterion could be introducing selection bias (Birnir et al. 2018). The final research question therefore concerns ethnic groups whose relevance is social, not political, and whether the horizontal inequality-conflict relationship holds up when the analysis is extended to include them.

RQ 3: Do the findings on relative group deprivation and conflict extend to ethnic groups that are not politically relevant?

1.3 Theoretical framework

My main claim in this dissertation is that different combinations of political and economic relative group deprivation have different implications for two central choices that emerging movements make: between targeting the government or other ethnic groups, and between violent and nonviolent tactics.¹⁴ The choices are important because they influence what kind of conflict breaks out: civil war (violence targeting the government); communal conflict (violence targeting another ethnic group) or other less organized forms of violence; or nonviolent conflict (non- violence targeting the government).¹⁵ The conflicts differ widely in dynamics and consequences, including destruction and success rates (Stephan and Chenoweth 2008). This section synthesizes the claims the two articles in Part II make on differences in opportunity structure that influence the choice of target and tactics; before moving to the individual level to outline group members’ tactical incentives, as investigated in Part III. But first, it presents basic assumptions.

14In addition to these overarching strategic choices, movements face the day-to-day choice of specific targets (the military vs. the police, civilians vs. fighters, location etc.) and tactical repertoire (demonstrations vs. strikes vs. sit- ins, riots vs. guerilla tactics vs. conventional warfare). See Cunningham, Dahl, and Frugé (2017).

15A fourth combination is possible: nonviolent conflict, like boycotts or strikes, which target another ethnic group that is not in government. They are understudied, however, and I do not know of any dataset that covers them.

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1.3.1 Basic assumptions

First, I assume that individuals have agency. They are ‘purposeful and goal directed, guided by interests [or values] […] and by the rewards and constraints imposed by the social environment’

(Coleman 1986, 1310). Strict notions of rational choice treat an act as rational if (i) it is the best means of satisfying one’s desires (preferences), given one’s beliefs; (ii) the beliefs are as well supported as possible, given the evidence; and (iii) the evidence results from an optimal investment in information gathering (Elster 2015, 235). I treat individuals as rational in terms of the first two criteria, with certain qualifications. I assume that they have transitive, but not neces- sarily complete, preferences.¹⁶ Importantly, their preferences need not be selfish or material (Elster 2015, 237). People’s value systems have other-regarding and nonmaterial components.

Experimental evidence shows that the well-being of individuals depends on the social groups they identify with (Tajfel 1978, Tajfel and Turner 1986); and emotion serves as a source of motivation that is crucial for ranking preferences (Simon 1997, 91, Mercer 2005, 94).¹⁷ Other- regarding and emotional motivations, like solidarity and resentment, can therefore be part of a rational explanation of collective action.

I assume that most people update their beliefs when they get new information. Like most of the rational choice literature, I do not assume that they make an optimal investment in information gathering; mainly because uncertainty makes it hard to determine what is optimal in this regard (Elster 2015, 249). In general, however, I expect group leaders to make a larger investment in information gathering than regular group members. Finally, while I acknowledge that human behavior is guided by a range of mental quirks that can work against rational choice, high stakes, like those involved in conflict, can provide a corrective (Elster 2015, 481).

The link between macro social phenomena like group disadvantage and conflict cannot be explained without reference to individual beliefs, preferences and actions; but in the articles in Part II, I make the simplifying assumption that ethnic groups can be treated as unitary and minimally rational actors. Researchers should take care to avoid essentialist claims about group unity, but arguments that deny the usefulness of the notion of ethnic groups altogether (e.g.

Brubaker 2002) take ontological individualism too far (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013, 20-24). Whether groups with collective agency exist in society is ultimately an empirical question, and the multiple cross-national datasets that record ethnic groups suggest they often do (Birnir et al. 2018, EPR 2014, Fearon 2003, Alesina et al. 2003). Some groups, like the Pales- tinians, have several leaders and organizations fighting for they cause (Pearlman 2011). Some- times they use different strategies; and compete for members’ support (Cunningham 2013a, Cunningham, Dahl, and Frugé 2017, Pearlman and Cunningham 2012, Bloom 2004). Thus, the group unity assumption is an obvious simplification. It is least problematic when studying conflict onset, as contentious movements should become increasingly likely to fragment over time.

16That is, I assume that a person that finds option A at least as good as B and B at least as good as C, should also think A is at least as good as C; while I acknowledge that it is not always possible for a person comparing two options to say whether he prefers one over the other or is indifferent between the two (Elster 2015, 237-238).

17Emotion may also influence the choices themselves, by directing attention and serving as the source of action (Mercer 2005, 94). Emotion can stand in opposition to reason when it narrows attention to narrow goals and makes us ignore information we would otherwise take into account; but it works with reason when it attaches to broad and permanent goals and helps us concentrate on solving complex problems (Simon 1997, 91).

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The group unity and rationality assumption is challenged by collective decision making and implementation processes: preferences can aggregate in non-rational ways, separate organizations form over tactical disagreements, and individuals decide not to follow collective decisions. Groups with strong leadership should be less vulnerable on all counts. In the next section, I argue that the strength of leadership in disadvantaged ethnic groups is a function of type of disadvantage, and that the unitary actor assumption is least likely to hold for groups whose disadvantages are exclusively economic, because they are more likely to lack leadership. The calculations individual group members make about tactics, which I investigate in Part III, thus become more important. Groups whose disadvantages are wholly or partially political are more likely to resemble unitary actors.

1.3.2 Choosing targets and tactics

Table 1 synthesizes the group level arguments I make in the two articles in Part II: the opportunity structures that come with each constellation of political and economic deprivation, and the conflict strategies they imply.

Table 1. Mechanisms and expectations

I assume the initial choices of targets and tactics are made primarily by the group elites who lead emerging movements (movement entrepreneurs). Precisely when the choices are made could vary between movements, depending on their origins. In some cases, a group of move-

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ment entrepreneurs will have decided on the strategy before they start recruiting. When movements emerge from pre-existing organizations, the decision-making process could be more comprehensive, requiring input from below.¹⁸ In general, the choice of target should precede the choice of tactics in time.

When groups decide to target the government, the question arises: why were the actors unable to find negotiated solutions short of costly conflict (see e.g. Fearon 1995), like power sharing, or economic redistribution schemes preferable to potentially protracted war? It is difficult for ethnic groups to make credible commitments to negotiated solutions, however, because ethnic allegiances are more rigid and fixed than many other allegiances. For an ethnic group that is growing, for example, a commitment to a power sharing deal based on current day de- mographics is not credible, because the state predicts that the group will renege on the deal once it becomes underrepresented (Denny and Walter 2014).¹⁹

When negotiated solutions are off the table, different constellations of economic and political deprivation come with different implications for the opportunity groups have to improve their situation with different conflict strategies; and thus their choices between targets and tactics. I highlight four main differences between constellations in this regard: the extent to which group elites have an incentive to initiate conflict, the ability to blame the government, the ability to achieve redistribution without involving the government, and economic leverage. Leverage is the ability to make the networks the state depends on for its power put pressure on the state or withdraw support (Schock 2005, 144-145). Ethnic groups can exercise economic leverage via ties with co-ethnics in the economic elite, or by hurting the interests of the wider economic elite with disruption and economic noncooperation.

Group elites in groups whose disadvantages are exclusively economic should be less likely than politically disadvantaged elites to provide the leadership required to launch organized violence against the government, because they are reluctant to jeopardize their own positions of power, or the chance to work to reform the system from within (Langer 2005). If some of these groups have leaders that are willing to challenge the government despite their groups’ political inclusion, they might have a hard time convincing group members the government is to blame for their disadvantage; because economic deprivation can have complex causes, like climatic and geographic conditions and colonial exploitation, while political disadvantages are fairly easy to pin on the state (Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013). In general, elites that try to pin the blame on a government they are themselves represented in should seem less credible.

The groups may aim for redistribution through attacks on other ethnic groups, like cattle raids or clashes over grazing land or water, which require less organization, leadership and resources than attacks against the state. Because the groups are represented in the government, they have less reason than excluded groups to fear government intervention when they attack other groups; at least in the weakly institutionalized states where communal clashes are most common (Rudolfsen 2017). This makes communal violence a viable alternative. In the absence

18I discuss how tactics may change over time in the section on future research.

19Ethnic groups may also be more likely to have deep ties to territory for historic or cultural reasons, which could create issue indivisibilities that are not obviously amenable to side-payments and similar solutions (Toft 2006).

Information problems are less likely to be driving ethnic conflict. The distribution of ethnic groups in a country and their overall commitment to change should be relatively predictable for the government (Denny and Walter 2014, 206); even if the precise extent of support for change among group members is sometimes hard to gauge.

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of leadership, group members may also resort to other less organized and smaller-scale forms of violence, like riots, to express their discontent (Gurr 1970, 334-338). The unitary actor assumption is less likely to hold for groups with exclusively economic disadvantages than for other deprived groups. Communal clashes and riots could be initiated by local subgroups, or by small gangs of armed youth acting without the approval of local elders and group elites (Agade 2010). In Part III, I investigate the individual level mechanisms that govern group member behavior in the absence of strong movement leadership.

Groups whose disadvantages have a political component should be better able to motivate the leadership required to launch organized challenges;²⁰ and to blame the government for their situation. If their disadvantage is exclusively political, they are more likely than other deprived groups to succeed with a strategy of nonviolent action targeting the government. Because the groups are not economically disadvantaged, their economic leverage vis à vis the government is larger, on average, than for other deprived groups. Because the groups are more central to their countries’ economies, they are more likely to have co-ethnics in the economic elite that can be persuaded to pressure the government, and better able to cause enough economic disruption to coerce the rest of the economic elite and by extension the government.

The groups whose disadvantages are both economic and political should be most likely to target the government with violence. Nonviolent action is less likely to be a viable option than for groups with exclusively political disadvantages, because economic disadvantages reduce economic leverage. In addition, group leaders may reason that if politically excluded groups attack other ethnic groups for redistribution, the government is likely to intervene, at least if they attack a more powerful group. Combined with the fact that any change to the political distribution will have to go through the government, this makes communal violence an unap- pealing option.

1.3.3 The role of the individual

This section outlines the shift in analytical attention that underpins my third and fourth article, in Part III of this dissertation: from macro level analysis to the ambition to bridge group and individual level analysis. Shifting attention to the individual allows me to begin to disentangle the mechanisms of the horizontal inequality account of conflict from those of the prominent opportunity cost explanation. The latter holds that the poorer an individual is, the fewer material rewards are required to offset the expected cost of participation, because there is little to forego outside the movement. Horizontal inequality proponents acknowledge that low opportunity cost should be part of an explanation of recruitment; but argue group identity and grievance are at least as important. Many movements motivated by relative group deprivation cannot afford to offer the material rewards required to offset the cost of participation, even in the face of low opportunity costs, but must rely on nonmaterial and other-regarding rewards discussed above.

Because group solidarity plays such a pivotal role in the framing of group grievances, it should

20This is in line with the more general argument from Gurr (1970, 334-338) about the interaction between mass and elite forms of relative deprivation and forms of violence.

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not only the poorest members of a deprived groups that support its challenge against the government, but also some better-off members.

Where the horizontal inequality literature tends to be restricted to civil war, and studies of nonviolent resistance to maximalist campaigns, the use of survey data allows me to lower the threshold to account for a wider range of claims and scales. Participants in highly organized, covert insurgencies are unlikely to be captured in survey data, but accounting for these other, more common forms of contention is crucial if we want to understand conflict mobilization.

This dissertation is the first, to my knowledge, to investigate how individual group members’

choice between violent and nonviolent tactics varies with group disadvantage. Intuitively, economic group deprivation should make group members at least as likely to join nonviolent as violent movements, because it is less costly, on average, for the individual participant. The op- posite should be the case for disadvantaged ethnic groups, however, because their members can expect to get more emotional satisfaction from violent than from nonviolent action; and may expect violence to be a more effective strategy for redressing their disadvantage.

Individuals do not make decisions in a vacuum. The individual level emotions and efficacy mechanisms are inextricably linked to group level mechanisms. Individuals’ considerations about what tactics to embrace, and by extension what movements to join, influence group leaders’ choices between tactics indirectly. The latter make assumptions about what tactics the former will accept. If they are wrong, the movement may never get off the ground. Group leader decisions about tactics affect individual choices more directly. Because the cost of starting your own movement is high, the existence of a violent or nonviolent movement, that is, the tactics chosen by group leaders, and their collective action framing efforts, could skew the decisions of individual group members. In the fourth article, I argue that because strong movement leadership is more likely among politically excluded groups, group leaders’ strategic considerations over economic leverage are more likely to filter down to individual group members in these groups, thus reinforcing the choice of violent over nonviolent forms of protest among members of groups with a combined economic and political disadvantage.

Where the group level analyses in Part II explore the determinants of conflict onset, Part III investigates individuals’ decisions to join movements that already exist, thus affecting their duration. The distinction between onset and duration should not be overstated. The initiation and continuation of conflict is best conceptualized as a continuous process of escalation, from the first claim an emerging movement makes, via small-scale activities to large-scale conflict.

Deciding what point in the process to regard as a conflict’s onset introduces an element of arbitrariness. The challenge of escalation is discussed in more detail in the section on future research.

A related complication concerns the dynamics of ongoing conflict. After its onset, the conflict itself could begin to influence individual beliefs, preferences, and decisions to join, remain in or leave the movement; which would influence conflict duration, and possibly strategic choices made along the way. The analyses in my first three articles are not particularly vulnerable to this dynamic; the former two because they study conflict onset; the latter because it investigates a single conflict at a single point in time. The fourth article, on the other hand, captures people across different stages of different conflicts, without being able to account for the differences empirically. I discuss this challenge in more detail in the article’s theory section.

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1.4 Empirical approach

To investigate the claim that different constellations of deprivation have different implications for conflict, I adopt a two-pronged large-N approach; where Part II applies datasets on ethnic groups, and Part III introduces survey data. Each part consists of two research articles (dissertation chapters).²¹ This section discusses overarching challenges to measurement validity, gen- eralizability, causal inference and the interpretation of statistical results; leaving specific data sources and model specification to the individual articles.

Table 2. Article overview

1.4.1 Data and measurement

The conceptual restriction of this dissertation to economic and political inequality between ethnic groups is reflected in its inequality measures. See Table 2 for an overview of the articles and their data sources. In this section, I discuss two overarching measurement distinctions: between inequality measures from the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) (Articles 1 and 4) and All Minorities at Risk (AMAR) (Article 2) datasets, and conflict measures of attitudes (Article 3) and participation (Article 4).²²

21Article 1 is presented in Chapter 2, Article 2 in Chapter 3, Article 3 in Chapter 4, and Article 4 in Chapter 5.

22A third issue is that riots are coded differently in Article 2 and 4. In Article 4 they are captured as a violent tactic, but I am unable to distinguish them from nonviolent forms of protest in the AMAR data (Article 2). In Article 2, I argue that this works against my empirical expectations, making the analysis a more conservative test.

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The definitions of economic and political status are broader in AMAR (Birnir et al. 2018) than in the EPR dataset family (Vogt et al. 2015). The former conceptualizes political deprivation as substantial underrepresentation in all kinds of political office and participation. The latter is restricted to exclusion from executive power. Economic deprivation in AMAR denotes all significant poverty and underrepresentation in desirable occupations that restrict economic opportunities relative to other groups. The EPR variables measure how far below the national average a group’s GDP per capita falls.²³ The economic deprivation variable I construct from AMAR is binary (Article 2), which makes it less nuanced than the continuous EPR variable (Articles 1 and 4). The former also depends on more coder discretion, in operationalizing ‘substantial underrepresentation’ and ‘desirable occupations’. Table 3 shows how ethnic group years are distributed across the different constellations of deprivation in the two datasets. Because I am able to reproduce the main relationships from previous EPR-based studies with AMAR measures (Article 2), I content they capture the same underlying concepts.

Table 3. Percentage of group years by constellation of deprivation

Political relative group deprivation

No Yes

Economic relative group deprivation

No 29 [39] 9 [22]

Yes 8 [12] 54 [26]

Percentage of group years in AMAR 1985-2005 [EPR 1989-2009]. I dichoto- mize the EPR measure of economic deprivation so groups are deprived if their country's average GDP per capita is at least ten percent higher than the group's GDP per capita.

Analyses of attitudinal support for conflict (Article 3) capture only parts of the inequality- conflict chain of mechanisms, but they offer an important complement to analyses of participation (Article 4). In addition to influencing the likelihood of conflict via participation, inequality can influence conflict indirectly, by motivating supportive actions: from the refusal to provide information to government agents, to the provision of shelter, food or information (Justino 2009, 316, Kalyvas 2006, Weinstein 2007, 163). And while the correlation between attitudes and behavior is far from automatic – people can express support without acting on it – attitude- behavior consistency tends to be stronger when a range of behavioral responses is considered (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005, 181), for attitudes formed through direct experience, and when the attitude object is important to the individual (Fazio and Zanna 1978, Regan and Fazio 1977, Krosnick 1988).

Self-reported survey measures of participation could introduce reporting bias. In this dissertation, the relationship between deprivation and participation could be underestimated if re- spondents from the most deprived groups underreport participation more than others, for fear of government sanctions. In Article 4, I therefore run a robustness test where I exclude respond- ents who think the government sent the interviewers. Such reporting bias is less likely for

23I use a version of the variable that supplements geocoded data on GDP per capita with survey data on income and satellite data on nightlight emissions (Cederman, Weidmann, and Bormann 2015).

Choosing Targets and Tactics