TY - BOOK ID - 137274425 TI - Insurgency and Credible Commitment in Autocracies and Democracies PY - 2007 PB - Washington, D.C., The World Bank, DB - UniCat KW - Armed Conflict KW - Citizen KW - Citizens KW - Civil War KW - Conflict and Development KW - Emerging Markets KW - Ethnic Groups KW - Finance and Financial Sector Development KW - Financial Literacy KW - Governance KW - Health, Nutrition and Population KW - Labor Policies KW - Natural Resources KW - Parliamentary Government KW - Policies KW - Policy KW - Policy Research KW - Policy Research Working Paper KW - Political Parties KW - Political Systems and Analysis KW - Politics and Government KW - Popular Support KW - Population KW - Population Policies KW - Post Conflict Reconstruction KW - Private Sector Development KW - Progress KW - Public Information KW - Public Sector Corruption and Anticorruption Measures KW - Quality of Education KW - Secondary School KW - Segments of Society KW - Social Conditions KW - Social Conflict and Violence KW - Social Development KW - Social Protections and Labor KW - Wars UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:137274425 AB - This paper suggests a new factor that makes civil war more likely: the inability of political actors to make credible promises to broad segments of society. Lacking this ability, both elected and unelected governments pursue public policies that leave citizens less well-off and more prone to revolt. At the same time, these actors have a reduced ability to build an anti-insurgency capacity in the first place, since they are less able to prevent anti-insurgents from themselves mounting coups. But while reducing the risk of conflict overall, increasing credibility can, over some range, worsen the effects of natural resources and ethnic fragmentation on civil war. Empirical tests using various measures of political credibility support these conclusions. ER -