User:Aliciabarc/sandbox

civil war

Political scientist Elisabeth Wood from Yale University offers yet another rationale for why civilians rebel and/or support civil war. Studying the Salvadoran Civil War, Wood finds weak evidence on the role of traditional explanations of greed and grievance in the emergence of the insurgent movement in El Salvador. Instead, she argues that "emotional engagements" and "moral commitments" were the main reasons why thousand of civilians, most of them poor rural folks, joined or supported the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, despite individually facing both high risks and virtually no foreseeable gains. Wood also attributes participation (and/or support) in the civil war to the value that insurgents took from changing social relations in El Salvador, an experience she defines as the “pleasure of agency” .

Autocracy

Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis and Barry R. Weingast describe autocracies as limited access orders . In limited access orders, the state is ruled by a dominant coalition formed by a small elite group that relates to each other by personal relationships. In order to remain in power, this elite hinders the access of people outside the dominant coalition to organizations and resources.

For Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, the allocation of political power explains the maintenance of autocracies, which they usually refer to as "extractive states" . For them, the de jure political power comes from political institutions, whereas the de facto political power is determined by the distribution of resources. Those holding the political power in the present will design the political and economic institutions in the future according to their interests. In autocracies, both, de jure and de facto political powers are concentrated in one person or a small elite that will promote institutions for keeping the de jure political power as concentrated as the de facto political power, thereby maintaining autocratic regimes with extractive institutions.

According to this view, even though political institutions make the de jure political power look as more inclusive, the transition to a democracy will be unlikely if de facto power remains in the hands of a small elite. For example, autocratic regimes may adopt institutions that look like those from modern democracies, and yet not have democratic outcomes, a phenomenon dubbed as institutional mimicry .

The model of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty provides yet another explanation to why autocracies are maintained...