What are the odds of civil war? Investigating the relationship between quality of government, voter turnout, civil war, and the Democratic peace theory

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to quantitatively investigate the relationship between the quality of government, voter turnout, and civil war. By doing a hypothesistesting analysis through logistic regression. The hypothesis relevant to this thesis reads (1) There is a negative relationship between the quality of government and the odds of civil war and (2) In states, with high quality of government and a high percentage voter turnout there is a lower odd of civil war occurring, compared to only checking for QoG. Previous research has confirmed an inverted U-curved relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war, what this thesis contributes is instead of democracy as the independent variable, a measurement for quality of government is used. Quality of government covers more areas than what the definition of democracy does. Voter turnout is of interest due to the broad variation within different types of regimes. Firstly, two separate logistic regressions were conducted with the dependent variable occurrence of civil war, the first one with the independent variable quality of government, and secondly the dependent variable and the moderating variable voter turnout. Thereafter, a multiple logistic regression was conducted with the dependent, independent, and moderating variables. The data for the variables were gathered from three main research institutes within their field, namely Quality of Government, Uppsala Conflict Data Program, and Varieties of Democracy. The results of the thesis, show a variance, but support for the two hypotheses of this thesis, which describe that high quality of government decreases the odds of civil war. And when adding voter turnout to the model, after conducting a likelihood ratio test, depicts a better overall model compared to without quality of government and voter turnout. When discussing the results, it is evident that the democratic peace theory, which explains how democracies do not go to war with other democracies, can be applicable to the thesis results. The most recent years have shown numbers describing a decrease, but more intense, civil war, at the same time authoritarian regimes and hybrid regimes increase. These numbers do not correlate with previous research illustrating that hybrid regimes are most likely to develop civil war. Therefore, this thesis result concludes that quality of government cannot be categorized in the same manner as the three main regime types, but the thesis emphasizes that quality of government does explain some of the odds of civil war.