EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Do Civil Wars, Coups and Riots Have the Same Structural Determinants?

Cristina Bodea, Ibrahim Elbadawi and Christian Houle

International Interactions, 2017, vol. 43, issue 3, 537-561

Abstract: The literature on political instability focuses on institutional and leader survival or outcomes like civil wars and coups. We suggest that this approach overlooks lower levels of instability and that isolating outcomes understates the likelihood that they are manifestations of similar structural determinants. We extend the notion of instability to encompass jointly but distinctly civil wars, coups, and riots. Our explanation focuses on the role of political institutions and the related ethnopolitical strife over state power. Using data from 1950 to 2007, we find that the three outcomes share some determinants such as a factional partial democracy and the exclusion from power of a large proportion of the population; the inverted U-shaped effect of political institutions is driven by a subset of semidemocracies; and there is a substitution relationship between civil wars and coups emerging from the composition of governing coalitions.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03050629.2016.1188093 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:ginixx:v:43:y:2017:i:3:p:537-561

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GINI20

DOI: 10.1080/03050629.2016.1188093

Access Statistics for this article

International Interactions is currently edited by Michael Colaresi and Gerald Schneider

More articles in International Interactions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:taf:ginixx:v:43:y:2017:i:3:p:537-561