Explaining Minimum Acceptable Demands of States and Rebels in Ethno-Territorial Civil Wars: The Roles of Democracy and Religion

Abstract

Direct, large-sample measures of leadership preferences on both sides of ethno-territorial civil wars have not hitherto been available. As a result, statistical research diverges from case study research in omitting analysis of causes and consequences of leadership preferences. We present a new database that directly measures variation in the nationalist ideological preferences of state and ethnic rebel group leaders for post-World War II, ethno-territorial civil wars. Our measures, four-level ordinal scales of minimum acceptable demands, capture both the extent and the intensity of leaders’ upside goals. We examine institutional and cultural sources of these measures while controlling for material sources. Institutionally, regime type more strongly predicts state-side demands than rebel-side demands. Among cultural sources, we find that religious identity-based predictors are significant and powerful predictors. Among material sources, we find that both relative power and status quo predictors have weak statistical and substantive significance. These results indicate that variation in leadership preferences is best explained by institutional and cultural forces, rather than by material conditions related to relative power or status quo conditions.