Does corruption trigger political violence? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (1970-2020)

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between corruption and political violence in 49 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1970-2020. Specifically, it examines whether corruption influences both the incidence and the brutality of political violence. To address this question, the study employs an articulated estimation strategy: first, we analyze the impact of corruption on political violence incidence and brutality by using count data models (Negbin and ZINB) and a LPM; then we also employ an IV estimation for the OLS model and a Two-stage Residual inclusion (2SRI) estimation. Across the different specifications, our findings highlight a strong and positive relation between political corruption and both the incidence and brutality of political violence. Control variables present the expected relations with the dependent variable and in particular, we also focus on climate change. By employing also interaction terms between SPEI and corruption, the results suggest that an increase in precipitations in corrupted countries leads to and increase of violence. In addition, our main results show that past corruption level has a great impact on today violence, while past extreme weather events do not.