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This paper studies a dimension of protest largely overlooked in the literature: protest scope, that is, whether protests seek large, structural, changes for a large share of the population or focus on small-scale improvements for small groups. We argue that this protest dimension is relevant for understanding the political consequences of protests. We show empirically that protests vary substantially in scope and that scope is not collinear with other protest dimensions, such as size, motive, or tactics. We explore drivers of individual preferences for protest scope with a survey experiment in two South African townships. We find that respondents made to feel more efficacious tend to support protests of broader scope. This effect operates via a social psychology channel whereby efficacy leads people to assign blame for their problems to more systemic causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does horizontal social inequality play for political protest in middle-income countries? We argue that public social service provision is an important driver of state perceptions. When a state fails to deliver services in an equitable manner, trust in institutions erodes and protest becomes more likely. We use a mixed methods design to investigate this argument in South Africa. First, we combine police event records with census data to estimate correlations between service inequality and protests. Second, we draw on an opinion survey with 27,000 respondents to investigate the suggested mechanism linking social inequality to protest through political attitudes. Third, we focus on qualitative protest accounts in two areas identified by a matching approach to assess the plausibility of our quantitative findings. Throughout these analyses, we document a robust association between horizontal social inequality and protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where and how have precolonial institutions of conflict resolution remained intact? Although it is often argued that “traditional” institutions can play a key role in managing communal conflicts, little is known about the conditions of their “survival.” This article argues that historical, political, and cultural topographies are essential to understanding patterns of the persistence and demise of precolonial institutions. Traditional modes of conflict resolution remain strong where they have been internalized over centuries: in the cultural and political centers of precolonial states. I use original geocoded survey data and historical spatial information on precolonial Burundi to analyze this hypothesis. The estimations yield robust correlations between the geographic patterns of the precolonial kingdom and current modes of resource-related conflict resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do states build a security apparatus after violent resistance against state rule? This article argues that in early periods of state building two main factors shape the process: the macro-strategic goals of the state and administrative challenges of personnel management. These dynamics are studied in the context of the establishment of police forces in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. The empirical analysis relies on information about the location of police stations and a near full census of police forces, compiled from the German Federal Archives. A mismatch is found between the allocation of police presence and the allocation of police personnel. The first was driven by the strategic value of locations in terms of extractive potential, political importance, and the presence of critical infrastructure, whereas the allocation of individual officers was likely affected by adverse selection, which led to the assignment of low-quality recruits to strategically important locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue "Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies" surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism's long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does extraction increase the likelihood of antistate violence in the early phases of state-building processes? Although research has focused on the impacts of war on state building, the potential “war-making effects” of extraction have largely been neglected. The article provides the first quantitative analysis of these effects in the context of colonial state building. It focuses on the “Maji Maji” rebellion (1905-1907), the most substantial incidence of anticolonial violence in Eastern Africa. Analyses based on a new historical data set confirm the correlation between extraction and resistance. More importantly, they reveal that distinct strategies of extraction produced distinct outcomes. Although the intensification of extraction in state-held areas created grievances among the population, it did not drive the rebellion. Rather, the results indicate that the expansion of extractive authority threatened the interests of local elites and provoked effective resistance. This finding provides insights into the mechanisms driving the “extraction–coercion cycle” of state building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to violence can shape people’s political and social perceptions. War-time effects on trust in state institutions are particularly relevant for political stability in the aftermath of violent conflict. If people distrust the state, they are less likely to endorse reform plans, will be less inclined to comply with state rules and regulations, and may uphold support for challengers of state authority. Our paper contributes to the understanding of the role of violence for trust in the national government. We use high-quality, geo-referenced survey data, joined with village-level information on civil war casualties, to estimate the effects of exposure to violence on political trust in Nepal. We find that exposure to violence matters for reducing trust in the national government. This association seems to be mainly driven by effects of violence at the outbreak of the conflict as well as at the end of the civil war period under investigation. These findings shed new light on the complex associations between exposure to violence and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests whether local religious institutions have a dampening effect on the probability of communal violence. It argues that a dense layer of institutions strengthens horizontal and vertical contacts and networks within religious communities. Horizontal linkages help to bridge social, economic, and ethnic divisions. Vertical contacts enable religious leaders to stay informed about communal grievances among their followers and to coordinate conflict resolution attempts. In our analysis of more than 60,000 villages in Indonesia, we are able to document a statistically significant and substantively meaningful negative effect of the density of local religious institutions on the probability of mass fighting. This effect is robust to the inclusion of an exhaustive list of confounding variables and alternative measures of violence. We present additional evidence that this pacifying effect of religious institutions is weaker or absent in conflicts that evolve along explicitly religious cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on a research which examines the role of state capacity for political violence in southern Sudan from 2006 to 2010. It mentions some methodological and theoretical shortcomings of previous studies on the impact of state capacity on such violence. It notes the inverted-U shape that the subnational effect of state capacity on political violence followed. The manpower dimension of state capacity is used to test the appearance of such shape.