Going postal: State capacity and violent dispute resolution |
| |
| Affiliation: | 1. HEC Paris, France;2. CEPR, United Kingdom;1. Department of Politics, NYU & Division of Social Science, NYU Abu Dhabi, 19 West 4th Street, 2nd Floor, NYNY 10012, United States;2. Department of Political Science, Florida State University, 551 Bellamy Building, Tallahassee, FL. 32306, United States;3. Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Hua Shan Road, Shanghai, 200030, P.R. China;1. Universitat Jaume I, Spain;2. Burgundy School of Business, France;3. Economix, UPL, Univ Paris Nanterre, CNRS;4. University of Innsbruck, Austria;5. New York University Abu Dhabi & Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, NYUAD Saadiyat Island, PO Box 129188, Building A5, Office A5 179, Abu Dhabi, UAE;1. Williams College, 24 Hopkins Hall Drive, Schapiro Hall, Williamstown MA 01267, USA;2. NYU Abu Dhabi, Division of Social Science, Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE |
| |
| Abstract: | Scholars have long tried to understand the conditions under which actors choose to use violent versus non-violent means to settle disputes, and many argue that violence is more likely in weakly-institutionalized settings. Yet, there is little evidence showing that increases in state capacity lowers the use of violent informal institutions to resolve disputes. Utilizing a novel dataset of violence—specifically, duels—across American states in the 19th century, we use the spread of federal post offices as an identification strategy to investigate the importance of state capacity for the incidence of violent dispute resolution. We find that post office density is a strong, consistent, and negative predictor of dueling behavior. Our evidence contributes to a burgeoning literature on the importance of state capacity for development outcomes. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
