Income Inequality, Regime Repressiveness, and Political Violence

Death rate from political violence is postulated to vary cross-nationally as a positively accelerated time-lagged function of income inequality and as a nonmonotonic inverted "U" function of regime repressiveness. The former hypothesis is consistent with approaches to the explanation of collective political violence that emphasize the general concept of discontent or, more specifically, relative deprivation; the latter hypothesis is consistent with a political-process version of the resource mobilization approach. In the context of a multivariate model estimated across two decades, 1958-67 and 1968-77, support is found for the inequality hypothesis. Support also is foundfor the regime repressiveness hypothesis in the decade (1968-77) for which the index of regime repressiveness is available. The U-curve effect of regime repressiveness appears to have stronger impact on variation in rates of deadly political violence than the positively accelerated effect of income inequality.