The Logic of Political Violence

Political violence is common place in weakly institutionalized polities. This paper o¤ers a uni…ed approach for studying political violence whether it emerges as repression or civil war. We formulate a model where an incumbent or opposition can choose to use violence as a means of acquiring or maintaining power. We study the institutional and economic factors that determine the use of one-sided or two-sided violence (repression or civil war). The model gives way naturally to a hierarchy of violence states from peace via repression to civil war, which forms the basis for an empirical approach. Accordingly, we construct an ordered variable to explore the empirical determinants of violence. Exploiting only the within-country variation in violence, we show that violence is associated with shocks which can a¤ect wages and aid. As predicted by the theory, this e¤ect is only present in countries where political institutions are weak. This is a signi…cant revision and extension of an earlier paper, circulating under the