Repression, Rationality and Relative Deprivation; A Theoretical and Empirical Examination of Cross-National Variations in Political Violence

Abstract

This paper develops a theory of political violence that is based on the rationality of individual agents. Violence is shown to be negatively related to the availability of alternative means of acquiring political goods and to the availability of alternative economic opportunities. Under quite general assumptions, the theory also predicts that the level of political violence in a society will have an inverted U-shaped relationship to the level of state repression; violence will be low under low- and high- levels of repression and will peak at middling levels of repression. In a series of tests using pooled cross-sectional/time series data, the model is shown to outperform a number of existing relative deprivation and social disorganization theories of political violence.