Fighting against the odds
Halvor Mehlum and
Karl Ove Moene
Economics of Governance, 2006, vol. 7, issue 1, 75-87
Abstract:
The fight for power is not only over immediate rents, but also over advantageous positions in future power struggles. When incumbency yields an extra fighting edge, current struggles involve high stakes as a victory today may guarantee the victory also tomorrow. Such an incumbency edge may stem from the control of the army, the police and other instruments reserved for the government. The conclusions drawn from static conflict models are turned on their head when the fight is also over the incumbency edge. A sharper incumbency edge increases the implicit prizes of winning. The fighting intensity may therefore rise when the strength of each side becomes more unequal. Unbalanced fights can last long and become particularly severe. This is in contrast to the standard result that equal strengths give the most intense fighting. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2006
Keywords: Contests; political stability; war; incumbency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10101-005-0094-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
Working Paper: Fighting against the odds (2005) ![Downloads](/downloads_econpapers.gif)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:7:y:2006:i:1:p:75-87
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10101/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10101-005-0094-1
Access Statistics for this article
Economics of Governance is currently edited by Amihai Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger
More articles in Economics of Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).