Can targeted land reform reduce levels of civil war conflict by mitigating the factors that contribute to rural rebellion? This paper uses new micro-level data on land reform and insurgency at the municipal level from Colombia from 1988-2000, a country with high rates of land inequality and...

Violence during armed conflict has been explained using a variety of theories, including rationality, organizational dynamics, and personal and collective grievances. These explanations overlook the significance of so-called "irrational" belief systems that are found in different countries among...

Violence during armed conflict has been explained using a variety of theories, including rationality, organizational dynamics, and personal and collective grievances. These explanations overlook the significance of so-called "irrational” belief systems that are found in different countries...

Can local organizations give civilians the capacity to protect themselves from civil war violence? Civilians have traditionally been considered powerless when facing armed groups but new research suggests organized communities may promote security through nonviolent strategies such as resolving...

When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? A long-standing literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should be both higher and...

How does volatility under dictatorship affect the likelihood of democratization? Most scholarship focuses on differences in levels of key factors hypothesized to impact the likelihood of transition. This study, by contrast, investigates how volatility in elite welfare affects transition. That a...

This Research Note examines key issues of fit between theory and methods in the study of distributive politics. While many scholars have moved toward using individual-level data to test theories of distributive politics, no studies have ever explicitly examined differences between individual and...