Jose Cheibub on Civil Wars in Africa
As part of the Comparative Politics Workshop at UIUC, Jose Cheibub shared some preliminary work on the relationship of civil wars and the holding of elections. As his point of departure, Cheibub takes on the prevailing wisdom that elections destabilize regimes and precipitate civil wars. This is interesting research that takes on a prevailing position with real world ramifications. The popular press and policy makers can often be found supporting the idea that countries should delay elections, in case the election serves to destabilize a fragile civil society, but is this position justified by observable data? Working on data from Africa, Cheibub (with co-author Jude C. Hays) does not find evidence of this relationship, questioning the wisdom of delaying elections in developing countries.
Cheibub wants to focus on the interplay between dictators and opposition. In Cheibub’s view there are “weak” and “strong” dictators. Strong dictators will always defeat opposition, either in elections via fraud or in a military battle. Therefore, we always observe peace when strong dictators are present. Weak dictators, however, may select elections as a way to defeat a challenge. Even if weak dictators win the election, there is the possibility of a subsequent civil war, so we may observe either peace or strife when dealing with weak dictators. This makes it difficult to infer whether a dictator was strong or weak, given peace (though war always indicates weak).
Cheibub is interested in pursuing a matching design, comparing country-years (in Africa) that are equally likely to hold an election. I think this is a reasonable approach, but I think providing a believable set of covariates will be difficult. As I’ve already noted, Cheibub wants to compare weak dictators or regimes to other equally weak regimes, but measuring regime strength is not going to be an easy task. This analysis is made more difficult by the fact that country-years are certainly not independent, both within and across countries.
During the question and answer period, I tried to suggest, though I think I was not being clear, that it may be easier to change the level of analysis. Cheibub is looking at the level of the country-year and asks if an election or a civil war occurred in those years. Perhaps a better level of analysis may be the regime level. If we can match regimes (perhaps on length of term, type of regime, method of acquiring power, etc.), we might have an easier time defining covariates. We may also eliminate some of the dependence between units. This design also focuses the analysis more carefully on the key question Cheibub wishes to address: how do weak dictators respond to challenges?
