UC Davis

In this dissertation I explore the factors driving of intrastate violence on an institutional and individual level. The first two papers are based off the same theoretical backing – that when intra-regime components do not support one another it creates an environment with both opportunity and grievances reduce coordination costs increasing the likelihood of intra-state violence. In the first chapter I examine how our current limited categorizing of regime type has stymied our understanding of institutional influences on civil war. When regimes are disaggregated into smaller regime components, we are able to examine how components interact with one another. Using Multidimensional scaling I create four components of democracy encapsulating elections, and three aspects of civil liberties. I then examine how each civil liberty component (Rule of Law, Freedom of Religion, and Expressions) affect the likelihood of civil war onset. Interestingly each component affects civil war onset differently; for example, as Rule of Law increases the probability of civil war onset reduces, but as Expressions/Freedom of Religion increase likelihood of onset increases. I then interact each components finding the highest likelihood of civil war onset is when Expressions is extremely high, and Rule of Law is really low. When these components are incoherent and working at against one another, any given regime will have both a higher opportunity to coordinate violence and higher grievances to motivate rebellion. In the second dissertation paper I expand this new theoretical framework to protests. Specifically, I focus on Expressions and Rule of Law’s interplay finding that when Expressions is higher than Rule of Law, there is an increased likelihood of protest and this increases as Expressions rises compared to Rule of Law.In the third paper of this dissertation, we argue organizational factors and leader messaging are key characteristics of religious organizations that induce aspects of social identity theory and reduce coordination costs making organizing of out-group violence against other religious groups easier. We do this by running a novel survey in India, a state with significant levels of religious intergroup violence, in an attempt to isolate what mechanisms within religion can make religious based outgroup affect reduce and violence more likely. In India we find that when respondents report their religious organizations to be more hierarchical, they tend to view outgroups more favorably. However, the more a respondent agrees local religious leader, the more likely they are to higher outgroup animosity. When we separate the sample into those whose leaders have called for or support violence against other religious groups, then we find that respondents tend to approve of their leaders the more hierarchical they perceive the group to be. Yet respondents whose leaders have called for violence are also more likely to agree with their leaders as there is a higher religious organizational density, but the level of how religious the respondent is does not affect their level of agreement with leaders who call for violence. Those whose leaders who did not call for violence have no effect from religious organizational density, but we find that respondents tend to agree more with their local religious leader when they are more religious.