Lecture 3

Question 1

the four impacts of coding rules on conflict conceptualization

Answer 1

• look at the operational definition of civil war
• provide insights into our ability to measure civil war and distinguish it from other forms of political violence
• stress the importance to know if our understanding of civil war is affected by different coding rules
• avoid the risk of making inferences from unstable empirical results

Question 2

what does Sambanis say about civil war

Answer 2

that it is distinguished from other forms of internal armed conflict by the requirement that state violence should be sustained and reciprocated and that the war exceeds a certain threshold of deaths (typically one thousand)

Question 3

4 challenges that Sambanis’ paper brings up

Answer 3

• it is often difficult to distinguish extrastate from intrastate wars
• what degree of organization to distinguish a civil war from one-sided, state sponsored violence
• with a numerical threshold of deaths to identify wars, how do we deal with the problem of unreliable reporting and incomplete data
• given that violence during civil war is typically intermittent, how do we determine when an old war stops and a new one starts

Question 4

how many qualifiers does Sambanis have for Civil War onset

Answer 4

11

Question 5

sambanis version A coding

Answer 5

code a 1 when a civil war starts and drop observations of ongoing war in that country until the war ends

Question 6

sambanis version B coding

Answer 6

code a 1 whenever a war starts even if another war is ongoing - country years with no new war starts are coded 0 and in this war, we end up with more war starts

Question 7

Sambanis results with variables leading to civil war omset

Answer 7

the results presented in Tables 2, 4, 6 suggest wide ranging agreement on the robustness of most other variables used in civil war models, especially when we consider the truncated period analyzed in table 2 and 4

Question 8

findings for oil exports, ethnic heterogeneity, and war in the previous period

Answer 8

they are the most significant differences with the coding

Question 9

findings for mountainous terrain

Answer 9

significant for collier and hoeffler, but is not a robust measure for civil war

Question 10

percentage of muslims finding

Answer 10

there is no robust association

Question 11

findings of GDP growth

Answer 11

generally not significant and may well be endogenous to levels of violence

Question 12

findings of ethnic fractionalization

Answer 12

very sensitive to coding rules

Question 13

how does sambanis define prevalence

Answer 13

as the union of onset and continuation of war so the dependent variable is coded 1 for all periods of war

Question 14

what type of model does sambanis use

Answer 14

Dynamic Probit models

Question 15

three conclusions for Sambanis

Answer 15

• demonstrate that there are substantial differences across civil war lists with respect to the coding of the onset and termination of civil war
• offer a new coding rule for civil war
• measure the substantive implications of differences in coding rules by formally comparing the empirical results using 12 different coding rules