The Nexus of Elites and War Mobilization

Ruixue Jia, Ying Bai and Jiaojiao Yang

No 16010, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: How do elites mobilize commoners to participate in a war? How does war mobilization affect elite power after the war? We argue that these two questions are interconnected, as elites mobilize war often because war benefits them. We demonstrate these relationships using the setting of the organization of the Hunan Army -- an army organized by one Hunanese scholar-general that suppressed the deadliest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion (1850--1864). We construct comprehensive datasets to depict the elites in the scholar-general's pre-war network as well as the distribution of political power before and after the war. By examining how pre-war elite connections affected where soldiers who were killed came from, and subsequent shifts in the post-war distribution of political power toward the home counties of these very elites, we highlight a two-way nexus of elites and war mobilization: (i) elites used their personal network for mobilization; and (ii) network-induced mobilization elevated regional elites to the national political stage, where they influenced the fortunes of the country after the war.

Keywords: War mobilization; Elite network; Power structure; State capacity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H11 L14 N45 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-04
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