An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

/pdf/ethnicity-insurgency-and-civil-war-48uws8pr17.pdf

Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

While heated arguments between practitioners of qualitative and quantitative research have begun to test the very integrity of the social sciences, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba have produced a farsighted and timely book that promises to sharpen and strengthen a wide range of research performed in this field. These leading scholars, each representing diverse academic traditions, have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable. Their book demonstrates that the same logic of inference underlies both good quantitative and good qualitative research designs, and their approach applies equally to each. Providing precepts intended to stimulate and discipline thought, the authors explore issues related to framing research questions, measuring the accuracy of data and uncertainty of empirical inferences, discovering causal effects, and generally improving qualitative research. Among the specific topics they address are interpretation and inference, comparative case studies, constructing causal theories, dependent and explanatory variables, the limits of random selection, selection bias, and errors in measurement. Mathematical notation is occasionally used to clarify concepts, but no prior knowledge of mathematics or statistics is assumed. The unified logic of inference that this book explicates will be enormously useful to qualitative researchers of all traditions and substantive fields.

Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research

This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how the value systems play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions - and that modernisation brings coherent cultural changes that are conducive to democratisation.

/pdf/modernization-cultural-change-and-democracy-the-human-4owb8jahix.pdf

Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

This paper aims to clarify the meaning, and explain the utility, of the case study method, a method often practiced but little understood. A “case study,” I argue, is best defined as an intensive study of a single unit with an aim to generalize across a larger set of units. Case studies rely on the same sort of covariational evidence utilized in non-case study research. Thus, the case study method is correctly understood as a particular way of defining cases, not a way of analyzing cases or a way of modeling causal relations. I show that this understanding of the subject illuminates some of the persistent ambiguities of case study work, ambiguities that are, to some extent, intrinsic to the enterprise. The travails of the case study within the discipline of political science are also rooted in an insufficient appreciation of the methodological tradeoffs that this method calls forth. This paper presents the familiar contrast between case study and non-case study work as a series of characteristic strengths and weaknesses—affinities—rather than as antagonistic approaches to the empirical world. In the end, the perceived hostility between case study and non-case study research is largely unjustified and, perhaps, deserves to be regarded as a misconception. Indeed, the strongest conclusion to arise from this methodological examination concerns the complementarity of single-unit and cross-unit research designs.

/pdf/what-is-a-case-study-and-what-is-it-good-for-pr7nzakso7.pdf

What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for

This paper is a systematic analysis of the comparative method. Its emphasis is on both the limitations of the method and the ways in which, despite these limitations, it can be used to maximum advantage. The comparative method is defined and analyzed in terms of its similarities and differences vis-a-vis the experimental and statistical methods. The principal difficulty facing the comparative method is that it must generalize on the basis of relatively few empirical cases. Four specific ways in which this difficulty may be resolved are discussed and illustrated: (1) increasing the number of cases as much as possible by means of longitudinal extension and a global range of analysis, (2) reducing the property space of the analysis, (3) focusing the comparative analysis on “comparable” cases (e.g., by means of area, diachronic, or intranation comparisons), and (4) focusing on the key variables. It is argued that the case study method is closely related to the comparative method. Six types of case studies (the atheoretical, interpretative, hypothesis-generating, theory-confirming, theory-infirming, and deviant case analyses) are distinguished, and their theoretical value is analyzed.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1955513.pdf

Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method

Eckstein introduces the political cultural approach as one of two viable options for theory in political science, the other being rational-choice theory. He then explains why the “cumulative socialization” process that he associates with culture leads to what he calls “expectations of continuity.” In short, since earlier learning builds on later learning, people acquire considerable inertia to their orientations toward the world and cannot easily accommodate rapid, extensive change. But, Eckstein acknowledges, if the cultural approach fails to incorporate change, it offers little help in explaining a world in which change is ubiquitous. Instead political culture theory predicts that certain changes are likely while others are not. For instance, people routinely alter their actions in efforts to maintain their preferred social patterns in moderately new situations. Particularly among the members of modern societies, for whom such new situations are common, Eckstein thinks that social patterns capable of accommodating considerable flexibility gradually develop. But new situations that confront people with large-scale contextual changes likely will overwhelm culture-bound creatures. Faced with such circumstances, people are apt to lapse into various forms of incoherent and fragmented reactions rather than deftly revising their actions in ways that maintain their social patterns. Thus revolutionary transformations through which societies attempt to realize unprecedented objectives are not likely to achieve their intended outcomes.

/pdf/a-culturalist-theory-of-political-change-32stf4p06c.pdf

A Culturalist Theory of Political Change

A theory of stable democracy

To understand what conditions make democracies stable or unstable, effective or ineffective, Professor Eckstein examines the stability and effectiveness of Norwegian democracy. He finds them both to be high. He then examines several theories derived from the study of other democracies or from comparative studies of other democratic and nondemocratic societies. Virtually all present an inadequate explanation of the Norwegian case, because the political divisions in Norway are the kind usually associated with instability and ineffectiveness of democratic rule. The author explains, however, that a profound sense of community exists despite the political cleavages.Originally published in 1975.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway

After World War II, political science, especially comparative politics, was transformed by a "scientific revolution". These 11 essays, written over 30 years, cover the major issues in comparative politics, from civil war to "civic inclusion" - that is, "the tendency over time to include in politics, in workplace decision-making, in education and in other institutional realms, people previously excluded from participation". Eckstein also deals with political science as a field: how it relates to political practice, how it developed in the pre-war period and how it emerged from the first post-war reshaping. In this collection of his work, Eckstein reflects on the issues and events - his personal experiences as a refugee from Nazi Germany and as an observer of European politics and cultures - that underlie and unify his thinking.

Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change

Using illustrations from past and current internal wars, thirteen social scientists here apply their many perspectives--derived from the fields of sociology, political science, and economics--to a variety of aspects of internal wars.

Internal War: Problems and Approaches

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