Three essays on behaviour in organised political violence

Abstract

What drives the decisions individuals make during wartime service? How do groups develop capacity to execute collective violence? How do democracies mobilise their populations to fight? I study these questions across American history from the Civil War, through racial violence in the Postbellum South, to the early stages of World War II. I develop theory at the individual-level, drawing from an interdisciplinary lens to answer these questions. I find that Irish-Americans who fled famine desert more in the Civil War since they are more risk averse. I show that counties settled later by whites lynch more often and have a greater capacity for collective action to demarcate racial interactions. I find that conscription and volunteering are complements in the sense that citizens are responsive to the threat of the draft and strategically enlist. In each study I collect and re-purpose large administrative datasets to measure new quantities such as an individual’s malnutrition in youth or how distinct names were across racial lines. I then deploy contemporary quantitative methods to test hypotheses with these large historical datasets, using designs such as regression discontinuities and new panel methods. I strive to use several different measurement strategies in each paper to develop a body of evidence in cases where clean identification is not feasible. I contribute to our understanding of when and why soldiers enlist and desert in cases of mass mobilisation. I also portray the importance of considering collective violence as a collective act; raising and coordinating a mob was necessary for lynchings to proliferate. Additionally, this work speaks to the importance of evaluating episodes of organised violence as a form of political behaviour. With the re-emergence of mass conventional warfare, it is crucial to diagnose the factors which define whether troops join and how they behave when on the frontlines.