IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joupea/v45y2008i2p261-282.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Polarization and Interstate Conflict

Author

Listed:
  • HÃ¥vard Hegre

    (Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), hhegre@prio.no)

Abstract

Esteban & Ray formalize the argument that conflict is likely to be more intense when individuals in a society are divided into two clearly identifiable groups where differences within groups are considerably smaller than differences between groups. They show that such polarization increases conflict, and they introduce a theoretical basis for its quantitative measurement. This article applies Esteban & Ray's (ER) measure of polarization to two international distributions: the world income distribution and the distribution of political systems. The article discusses extensions of the ER measure that render it independent of the number of groups in the system, and investigates empirically whether any of the three types of polarization are associated with conflict in the form of militarized interstate disputes. The results are rather inconclusive, despite the fact that some of the micro-level regularities consistent with the polarization and conflict argument have solid support in previous studies.

Suggested Citation

  • HÃ¥vard Hegre, 2008. "Polarization and Interstate Conflict," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 45(2), pages 261-282, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:45:y:2008:i:2:p:261-282
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/45/2/261.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Schwuchow, Soeren, 2018. "Extractive Institutions, Choking Taxes, and War: On the (Beneficial) Impact of Inequality in Autocracies," VfS Annual Conference 2018 (Freiburg, Breisgau): Digital Economy 181530, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    2. Buscema, Massimo & Ferilli, Guido & Sacco, Pier Luigi, 2017. "What kind of ‘world order’? An artificial neural networks approach to intensive data mining," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 46-56.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:45:y:2008:i:2:p:261-282. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.prio.no/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.