Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence

Thiemo Fetzer and Stephan Kyburz
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Stephan Kyburz: Center for Global Development

No 271, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict? Are cohesive institutions better in managing distributive conflicts? We study these questions exploiting exogenous variation in revenue disbursements to local governments together with new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria. We make three contributions. First, we document the existence of a strong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the actual resource. Second, we show that distributive conflict is highly organized involving political militias and concentrated in the extent to which local governments are non-cohesive. Third, we show that democratic practice in form having elected local governments significantly weakens the causal link between rents and political violence. We document that elections (vis-a-vis appointments), by producing more cohesive institutions, vastly limit the extent to which distributional conflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the available rents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level survey data.

Keywords: conflict; ethnicity; natural resources; political economy; commodity prices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L71 N52 O13 Q33 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-dev, nep-his, nep-pol and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2024)
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2019)
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018)
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018)
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018)
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:271

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