Mass Political Violence: A Cross-National Causal Analysis

Preface This book reports the quantitative empirical research I have been engaged in over the past few years on the casual processes underlying differences across nations in levels of mass political violence during the post-World War II period. Since I have been concerned with domestic violence at the macropolitical level, the specificity and the richness of detail that characterize micropolitical analyses or the study of particular cases have been sacrificed in favor of the potential for generalization made possible by a more global and aggregate investigation. The book is divided into three parts. Chapter 1 of Part I discusses the constraints imposed in the macroquantitative study of mass political violence and thereby defines the context within which the research was undertaken. The empirical base for the study is a recently compiled multiple cross-section of aggregate data on more than 100 nations. As the title of the book implies, my interest centered on events of domestic violence that had an antisystem character, were of immediate political significance, and directly involved or were sponsored by collectivities. Six of the available domestic violence variables satisfied these conditions: riots, armed attacks, political strikes, political assassinations, deaths from political violence, and antigovernment demonstrations. Dimensional analysis of these variables uncovered two clearly defined clusters. Riots, antigovernment demonstrations, and political strikes distinguished the first cluster, which I have denoted as Collective Protest. The second, denoted as Internal War, is indexed by armed attacks, deaths from political violence, and political assassinations. Chapter 2 of Part I describes these dimensional analyses and develops the method by which I create the composite measures of Collective Protest and Internal War that are used as the operational indicators of mass political violence throughout the rest of the book. Part II, Chapters 3 to 7, is devoted to an exploratory examination of "single equation" hypotheses and "partial" theories derived from the relevant literature. These analyses are designed to provide an empirical foundation for the specification of a more comprehensive model of mass political violence in Part III. Hence Part II represents an incremental and ix x Preface eclectic approach to the task of model specification and causal inference and reflects my unwillingness to rely exclusively on any single prior theoretical formulation. The factors examined in Part II include levels and rates of change in socioeconomic development; social structural imbalances and systemic frustration and satisfaction; cultural differentiation and national integration ; the behavior of …