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Objective. This study explores the effects of civil war outcome on post‐civil‐war democratization. We employ an expected utility model to argue that the attributes of the civil war that lead to balanced power relations between the warring parties lead to higher levels of postconflict democracy.Methods. We estimate a series of OLS regression models with change in the level of democracy (from the prewar level to five and ten years after the conflict ended) as the dependent variable.Results. Civil wars that end in negotiated settlements are more likely to experience higher levels of democratization than civil wars that end in military victory by either side. Identity‐based conflicts lead to lower levels of democratization while previous democratic experience seems to decrease post‐civil‐war democratization. We find no support for the argument that high war costs and U.N. peace‐keeping forces produce higher levels of democracy.Conclusions. Civil war may lead to more inclusive polities if it serves to even the balance of power between contending groups in the nation. Power balance is more likely to bring about more democratic polities, especially where power sharing is formalized in a negotiated settlement.

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal presents an anomaly for students of civil war and democratic transitions. How was the Maoist wing of the Nepal Communist Party able to mobilize peasants to support their insurgency when they could not mobilize enough peasants to vote for them in elections? The authors address these questions by exploring the ways in which the persistence of traditional clientelist networks in the countryside enabled rural elites to mobilize peasants to vote for parties other than the Maoist party, even though peasants would have benefited from that party's advocacy for land reform. When that same party used insurgent violence against rural elites, peasants were willing and able to support the insurgency and abstain from voting in the 1999 election in locales where the insurgency succeeded in disrupting clientelist ties. The authors test these arguments with district-level data on election turnout and the distribution of households among several land-tenure categories. Findings support the argument that turnout was greater where land-tenure patterns gave landed elite greater influence over peasant political behavior. Where higher levels of insurgent violence disrupted patterns of clientelist dependency, turnout declined. What electoral democracy could not deliver to peasants — land reform and relief from clientelist dependency — the Maoist insurgency promised to bring through political violence.

Nepal's Maoist party has been able to mobilize peasants for insurgency, but it could not mobilize them to vote for the communists in elections. Ties of clientelist dependency enabled landed elites to mobilize peasants to vote for other parties in 1992 and 1994, but insurgent violence weakened those ties, enabling Maoists to mobilize support for insurgency.

Whether repressive violence deters a shift in popular support away from the regime and toward the opposition; based on conference paper. Includes a case study of El Salvador.

Reexamination of findings of A. H. Miller, L. Bolce, & M. R. Haligan ("The New Urban Black Revisited" Ethnicity, 1976, 3, 338-367) shows that willingness to participate in civil violence is fairly evenly distributed across income, educational, & occupational strata, thereby disconfirming the social marginality hypothesis. However, militancy involves nonviolent protest as well as civil violence. To explore the complexities of this concept, discriminant function analysis is used to demonstrate that, while violence propensity is related to age but not to SES, willingness to participate in nonviolent protests is associated with higher SES. A tentative explanation of this pattern of relationships is offered, with the more politically motivated militancy of higher status groups being linked to their desire to eliminate various forms of racial discrimination. 4 Tables, 1 Figure. Modified HA

"Civil wars remain the most frequent and deadly form of organized armed conflict in the world. What Do We Know about Civil Wars? enlists leading scholars to guide students through cutting-edge research on civil war onset, duration, and outcomes, as well as the recurrence and consequences of civil wars to better understand global security."--