Weak States, Regime Types, and Civil War
A central theme in research on civil war and revolution is that ‘weak states’ are especially prone to civil war. Empirically, however, tests of this proposition have relied on proxy measures of state weakness such as GDP, mountainous terrain, and population, none of which directly measure features of the state itself. Earlier theoretical works point to particular regime types as being especially susceptible to civil war. We present a theoretical argument that delineates what regime types are more or less prone to civil war (and why) and test this theory with a series of logit models using Fearon and Laitin's and Sambanis' civil war data sets and Geddes' data classifying non-democratic regimes. The findings support earlier theoretical arguments that particular types of weak states – personalist or neopatrimonial regimes – are more prone to civil war onset than others.