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Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence

Thiemo Fetzer and Stephan Kyburz

No 210, OxCarre Working Papers from Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict?Are cohesive institutions better in managing distributive conflicts? We studythese questions exploiting exogenous variation in revenue disbursements tolocal governments together with new data on local democratic institutions inNigeria. We make three contributions. First, we document the existence of astrong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the actualresource. Second, we show that distributive conflict is highly organized involvingpolitical militias and concentrated in the extent to which local governmentsare non-cohesive. Third, we show that democratic practice in form havingelected local governments significantly weakens the causal link between rentsand political violence. We document that elections (vis-a-vis appointments), byproducing more cohesive institutions, vastly limit the extent to which distributionalconflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the availablerents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level surveydata.

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: 2018-06-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-cdm, nep-dev, nep-his, nep-pol, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2019) Downloads
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018) Downloads
Working Paper: Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence (2018) Downloads
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