Violence against noncombatant civilians in revolutionary conflicts: A psychosocial choice model and empirical tests, 1960–2018.

We offer a general theoretical model, and numerical simulations thereof, that reveal conditions under which a political leader chooses, or refrains from choosing, violence against noncombatant civilians as part of a contest with an opposing force. Employing augmented rational choice theory, which incorporates perspectives from psychology and sociology, the model involves a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) utility function over two goods, consumption and political control, with the latter in turn modeled on a CES production function involving three inputs, namely, direct fighting, intentional violence against civilians, and investments in group identity. When the model's parameters are set to reflect conditions of revolutionary as opposed to non-revolutionary conflict, the model predicts that violence against civilians is particularly high. Using data from 1960 to 2018, the model's prediction is well-supported by our empirical analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]