Yannick Pengl, Carl Müller-Crepon, Roberto Valli, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Luc Girardin
(2024).
The Train Wrecks of Modernization: Railway Construction and Nationalist Mobilization in Europe.
American Political Science Review, conditionally accepted for publication.
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This paper uses the gradual expansion of the European railway network 1816--1945 to investigate how this key technological driver of modernization affected ethnic separatism. Combining new historical data on ethnic settlement areas, conflict, and railway construction, we test how railroads affected separatist conflict and successful secession as well as independence claims among peripheral ethnic groups. Difference-in-differences, event study, and instrumental variable models show that, on average, railway-based modernization increased separatist mobilization and secession. Exploring causal mechanisms, we show how railway networks can either facilitate mobilization by increasing the internal connectivity of ethnic regions or hamper it by boosting state reach. As expected, separatist responses to railway access concentrate in countries with small core groups, weak state capacity, and low levels of economic development as well as in large ethnic minority regions. Overall, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of European modernization on nation building.
Lars-Erik Cederman, Yannick Pengl, Luc Girardin, and Carl Müller-Crepon
(2024).
The Future is History: Restorative Nationalism and Conflict in Post-Napoleonic Europe.
International Organization, 78(2), 259-292.
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The recent revival of nationalism has brought a threatening return of revisionist conflict. Yet, because of its radically modernist orientation dismissing past references as irrelevant, current scholarship on nationalism and political violence offers little guidance. Taking the nationalists seriously if not literally, we study how they use narratives harking back to past 'golden ages' to legitimize territorial claims and mobilize resources for action in post-Napoleonic Europe. Our analysis draws on geocoded data on state borders going back to the Middle Ages, combined with new spatial data on ethnic settlement areas from the 19th century retrieved from historical atlases. Our findings indicate that restorative nationalism, conceptualized as a loss of power and/or unity relative to past reference points, increases the risk of civil and interstate conflict.
Carl Müller-Crepon, Guy Schvitz, and Lars-Erik Cederman
(2024).
Shaping States into Nations: The Effects of Ethnic Geography on State Borders.
American Journal of Political Science, Early View.
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Borders define states, yet little systematic evidence explains where they are drawn. Putting recent challenges to state borders into perspective and breaking new methodological ground, this paper analyzes how ethnic geography and nationalism have shaped European borders since the 19th century. We argue that nationalism creates pressures to redraw political borders along ethnic lines, ultimately making states more congruent with ethnic groups. We introduce a Probabilistic Spatial Partition Model to test this argument, modeling state territories as partitions of a planar spatial graph. Using new data on Europe's ethnic geography since 1855, we find that ethnic boundaries increase the conditional probability that two locations they separate are, or will become, divided by a state border. Secession is an important mechanism driving this result. Similar dynamics characterize border change in Asia but not in Africa and the Americas. Our results highlight the endogenous formation of nation-states in Europe and beyond.
Carl Müller-Crepon
(2024).
Building Tribes: How Administrative Units Shaped Ethnic Groups in Africa.
American Journal of Political Science, Early View.
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Ethnic identities around the world are deeply intertwined with modern statehood, yet the extent to which territorial governance has shaped ethnic groups is empirically unknown. I argue that governments at the national and subnational levels have incentives to bias governance in favor of large groups. The resulting disadvantages for ethnic minorities motivate their assimilation and emigration. Both gradually align ethnic groups with administrative borders. I examine the result of this process at subnational administrative borders across Sub-Saharan Africa and use credibly exogenous, straight borders for causal identification. I find substantive increases in the local population share of administrative units' predominant ethnic group at units’ borders. Powerful traditional authorities and size advantages of predominant groups increase this effect. Data on minority assimilation and migration show that both drive the shaping of ethnic groups along administrative borders. These results highlight important effects of the territorial organization of modern governance on ethnic groups.
Carl Müller-Crepon, Guy Schvitz, and Lars-Erik Cederman
(2024).
'Right-Peopling' the State: Nationalism, Historical Legacies and Ethnic Cleansing in Europe, 1886-2020.
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Online First.
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Many European nation-states were historically homogenized through violent ethnic cleansing. Despite its historical importance, we lack systematic evidence of the conditions under which groups where targeted with cleansing and how it impacted states' ethnic demography. Rising nationalism in the 19th century threatened multi-ethnic states with right-sizing through secessionism and irredentism. States therefore frequently turned to brutal right-peopling, in particular where cross-border minorities and those with a history of political independence increased the risk of territorial losses. We test this argument with new spatial, time-variant data on ethnic geography and ethnic cleansing from 1886 to the present. We find that minorities that politically dominated another state and those that have lost political independence were most at risk of ethnic cleansing, especially in times of interstate war. At the macro-level, our results show that ethnic cleansing increased European states' ethnic homogeneity almost as much as border change. Both produced today's nation-states by aligning states and ethnic nations.
Janina Dill, Marnie Howlett, and Carl Müller-Crepon
(2023).
At Any Cost: How Ukrainians Think about Self-Defense Against Russia.
American Journal of Political Science, Early View.
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How do Ukrainians view the costs and benefits of armed self-defense? We examine support for different strategies Ukraine could pursue against Russia, using a conjoint survey experiment with 1,160 Ukrainian respondents, fielded in July 2022. The strategies have projected outcomes with varying degrees of political autonomy and territorial integrity and three expected costs: civilian fatalities, deaths among Ukrainian fighters, and risk of nuclear escalation. We find that Ukrainians strongly prefer strategies that fully restore Ukraine's political autonomy and territorial integrity, even if concessions would reduce the costs of fighting Russia. The moral principle of proportionality suggests that the expected costs of self-defense should not exceed its projected benefits, corresponding to calls on Ukraine to grant concessions to end the war. Our respondents' choices do not reflect this logic. Instead they evoke a categorical resistance against aggression: 79 percent of respondents oppose strategies leading to a Russian-controlled government, regardless of the costs.
Lars-Erik Cederman, Luc Girardin, and Carl Müller-Crepon
(2023).
Nationalism and the Puzzle of Reversing State Size.
World Politics, 75(4), 692-734.
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Having increased for centuries, territorial state size began to decline toward the end of the nineteenth century and has continued to do so. The authors argue that processes triggered by ethnic nationalism are the main drivers of this development. Their empirical approach relies on time-varying spatial data on state borders and ethnic geography since the nineteenth century. Focusing on deviations from the nation-state ideal, the authors postulate that state internal ethnic fragmentation leads to reduction in state size and that the cross-border presence of dominant ethnic groups makes state expansion more likely. Conducted at the systemic and state levels, the analysis exploits information at the interstate dyadic level to capture specific nationalist processes of border change, such as ethnic secession, unification, and irredentism. The authors find that although nationalism exerts both integrating and disintegrating effects on states' territories, it is the latter impact that has dominated.
Clara Neupert-Wentz and Carl Müller-Crepon
(2023).
Traditional Institutions in Africa, Past and Present.
Political Science Research and Methods, FirstView.
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To what degree and why are traditional institutions persistent? Following up on the literature on the long-term effects of precolonial institutions in Africa, we investigate whether and where today's traditional institutions mirror their precolonial predecessors. We do so by linking data on contemporary traditional institutions of African ethnic groups with Murdock's historical Ethnographic Atlas. We find a robust association between past and present levels of institutional complexity, differentiating between institutions' political centralization and functional differentiation. However, this persistence originates almost exclusively from former British colonies governed with more reliance on precolonial institutions than other colonies, in particular French ones. These findings contribute to research on the development and effects of traditional institutions, highlighting the need to account for varying persistence of traditional institutions.
Carl Müller-Crepon
(2021).
State Reach and Development in Africa since the 1960s: New Data and Analysis.
Political Science Research and Methods, 11(3), 663–672.
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Prominent arguments hold that African states' geography limits state capacity, impedes public service provision, and slows economic development. To test this argument, I collect comprehensive panel data on a proxy of local state capacity, travel times to national and regional capitals. These are computed on a yearly 5x5km grid using time-varying data on roads and administrative units (1966-2016). I use these data to estimate the effect of changes in travel times to capitals on local education provision, infant mortality rates, and nightlight emissions. Within the same location, development outcomes generally improve as travel times to its capitals decrease. These data and results improve the measurement of state capacity and contribute to the understanding of its effects on human welfare. <br /><br /> The data are available on this [Github page](https://github.com/carl-mc/state_reach_africa).
Carl Müller-Crepon, Yannick Pengl, and Nils-Christian Bormann
(2021).
Linking Ethnic Data from Africa (LEDA).
Journal of Peace Research, 59(3) 425–435.
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Social scientists increasingly combine multiple datasets to study ethnicity in Africa. We facilitate these efforts by systematically linking over 8'100 ethnic categories from eleven databases including surveys, geographic data, and expert-coded lists. Exploiting the linguistic tree from the Ethnologue database, we propose a systematic solution to the *grouping problem* of ethnicity. Novel empirical results on trust in African heads of states highlight the importance of explicitly considering sample inclusion criteria and different ways of linking ethnic categories from multiple datasets. An R-package allows researchers to link ethnic groups from any database with explicit rules and to easily add their own data on ethnic groups.
Carl Müller-Crepon
(2021).
Local Ethno-Political Polarization and Election Violence in Majoritarian vs. Proportional Systems.
Journal of Peace Research, 59(2), 242-258.
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How does local ethnic demography affect the conduct of majoritarian elections? Because legislative elections in majoritarian systems are contested locally, local ethno-political polarization increases the risk of pre-election violence. In districts that are polarized between politically competing ethnic groups, violence can be targeted with comparative ease at opposing voters, and can, if perpetrated collectively, mobilize the perpetrators' co-ethnics. I expect no such dynamics in PR systems where political competition plays out at higher geographical levels. To test this argument, I combine new data on the ethnic composition of local populations in 22 African countries with monthly data on riots and survey data on campaign violence. Ethno-politically polarized districts in majoritarian and mixed electoral systems see substantively larger increases in the number of riots prior to legislative elections and more fear of pre-election violence among citizens than non-polarized districts in the same country and at the same time. I do not find these patterns in PR systems. The results enhance our understanding of how electoral systems interact with local ethnic demography in shaping pre-election violence.
Janina Beiser-McGrath, Carl Müller-Crepon, and Yannick Pengl
(2021).
Who Benefits? How Local Ethnic Demography Shapes Political Favoritism in Africa.
British Journal of Political Science, 51(4), 1582–1600.
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This article investigates how local ethnic demography affects strategies of favoritism in Africa. Recent studies of ethnic favoritism report advantages of either presidents' ethnic peers or home regions. As regions in multi-ethnic states are rarely perfectly homogeneous, these studies cannot disentangle whether favoritism targets entire regions or co-ethnic individuals. We argue that governments' provision of goods depends on local ethnic demographies. Where government co-ethnics are in the majority, ethno-regional favoritism benefits all locals regardless of their ethnic identity. Outside of these strongholds, incumbents pursue discriminatory strategies and only their co-ethnics gain from favoritism. We use fine-grained geographic data on ethnic demography and infant mortality to test these hypotheses. Results from rigorous fixed effects specifications that exploit temporal changes in the ethnic composition of governments support our theoretical claims. Our findings have important implications for theories of distributional politics and conflict in multi-ethnic societies.
Carl Müller-Crepon, Philipp Hunziker and Lars-Erik Cederman
(2021).
Roads to Rule, Roads to Rebel: Relational State Capacity and Conflict in Africa.
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 65(2-3), 563-590.
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Weak state capacity is one of the most important explanations of civil conflict. Yet, current conceptualizations of state capacity typically focus only on the state while ignoring the relational nature of armed conflict. We argue that opportunities for conflict arise where relational state capacity is low, that is, where the state has less control over its subjects than its potential challengers. This occurs in ethnic groups that are poorly accessible from the state capital, but are internally highly interconnected. To test this argument, we digitize detailed African road maps and convert them into a road atlas akin to Google Maps. We measure the accessibility and internal connectedness of groups via travel times obtained from this atlas and simulate road networks for an instrumental variable design. Our findings suggest that low relational state capacity increases the risk of armed conflict in Africa.
Carl Müller-Crepon
(2020).
Continuity or Change? (In)direct Rule in British and French Colonial Africa.
International Organization, 74(4), 707-741.
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Low levels of development and state capacity in Africa are thought to originate in colonialism in general and indirect colonial rule in particular. But despite a century of debate about the nature, causes, and consequences of direct and indirect colonial rule on the continent, data and evidence about its application are scarce. Based on newly collected historical data, this paper provides evidence for two claims that have marked the debate since its inception. First, British administrations have ruled more indirectly than French ones. French colonization led to demise of 7 out of 10 pre-colonial polities. Under British rule, 3 out of 10 polities disappeared as measured by the continuation of their lines of succession. Second, pre-colonial centralization was a crucial prerequisite for indirect rule. Local administrative data from 8 British colonies shows that British colonizers employed less administrative effort and devolved more power to native authorities where centralized institutions existed. Such a pattern did not exist in French colonies. Together, these findings improve our understanding of the long-term effects of pre-colonial institutions, the roots of regional and ethnic inequalities, and the origins of currently observed customary institutions in Africa.
Carl Müller-Crepon and Philipp Hunziker
(2018).
New spatial data on ethnicity: Introducing SIDE.
Journal of Peace Research, 55(5), 687–698.
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Research on ethnic politics and political violence has benefited substantially from the growing availability of cross-national, geo-coded data on ethnic settlement patterns. However, because existing datasets represent ethnic homelands using aggregate polygon features, they lack information on ethnic compositions at the local level. Addressing this gap, this article introduces the Spatially Interpolated Data on Ethnicity (SIDE) dataset, a collection of 253 near-continuous maps of local ethno-linguistic, religious, and ethno-religious settlement patterns in 47 low- and middle-income countries. We create these data using spatial interpolation and machine learning methods to generalize the ethnicity-related information in the geo-coded Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). For each DHS survey we provide the ethnic, religious, and ethno-religious compositions of cells on a raster that covers the respective countries at a resolution of 30 arc-seconds. The resulting data are optimized for use with geographic information systems (GIS) software. Comparisons of SIDE with existing categorical datasets and district-level census data from Uganda and Senegal are used to assess the data's accuracy. Finally, we use the new data to study the effects of local polarization between politically relevant ethnic groups, finding a positive effect on the risk of local violence such as riots and protests. However, local ethno-political polarization is not statistically associated with violent events pertaining to larger-scale processes such as civil wars.