Conflict and Governance

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-v

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2. The wide importance of conflict

   • Amihai Glazer, Kai A. Konrad

   Pages 1-6

3. Social identity, inequality and conflict

   • James A. Robinson

   Pages 7-21

4. Butter and guns: Complementarity between economic and military competition

   • Herschel I. Grossman, Juan Mendoza

   Pages 23-31

5. Targeting and political support for welfare spending

   • Karl Ove Moene, Michael Wallerstein

   Pages 33-54

6. How to understand, and deal with dictatorship: an economist’s view

   • Ronald Wintrobe

   Pages 55-78

7. Tax resistance, economy and state transformation in China and Europe

   • R. Bin Wong

   Pages 79-93

8. The rationality of revolution

   • Leonard Dudley

   Pages 95-121

9. Optimal law enforcement when victims are rational players

   • Nuno Garoupa

   Pages 123-134

10. Property rights and the evolution of the state

    • Yoram Barzel

    Pages 135-161

11. The political economy of organized crime: providing protection when the state does not

    • Stergios Skaperdas

    Pages 163-192

12. Social decision rules are not immune to conflict

    • Joan Esteban, Debraj Ray

    Pages 193-201

Economists and political scientists have recently begun to study formally how conftict and the possibility of conftict affects resource allocation and economic performance.! For example, an extensive empiricalliterature suggests that conftict and political instability adversely affects economic development and that higher 2 inequality causes poor economic performance by inducing increased conftict. In this paper I argue that a serious ftaw in this research has taken too individu­ 3 alistic a view of conftict. While the approach of methodological individualism is attractive, in reality individuals act not purely in isolation, but also as part of larger social groupings and networks. I therefore try to consider how these models of conftict may be extended to this type of situation and thus attempt to place individuals within a larger social setting to see how this alters our intuitions about conftict and its economic and political determinants and implications. But what groups are relevant? Individuals belong to many overlapping and cross cutting groups in society. While traditional Marxist analysis stressed dass groupings so that workers associated with workers and capitalists with capitalists, more recent literature (see Wright, 1985) has stressed the diversity of social groupings. Rather than associate along dass lines one might associate along gender, religious, or perhaps ethnic lines. Many strands of research have show how thinking of groups in this heterogeneous way can iIluminate both economic 4 and political behavior.

• Conflict
• Crime
• Ethnic conflict
• Political Economy
• Revolution
• Terror
• Theory of Conflict
• War

• Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, USA

  Amihai Glazer

• WZB, Berlin, Germany

  Kai A. Konrad

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