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Inequality and Insurgency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1987

Edward N. Muller  and
Mitchell A. Seligson
Edward N. Muller
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
Mitchell A. Seligson
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
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Abstract

Maldistribution of land in agrarian societies is commonly thought to be an important precondition of mass political violence and revolution. Others argue that because of the difficulty of mobilizing rural populations for political protest, land maldistribution is irrelevant except as part of an inegalitarian distribution of income nationwide. These rival inequality hypotheses have significant implications with respect to the kinds of reforms likely to reduce the potential for insurgency in a society. They are tested using the most comprehensive cross-national compilation of data currently available on land inequality, landlessness, and income inequality. Support is found for the argument that attributes the greater causal import to income inequality. Moreover, the effect of income inequality on political violence is found to hold in the context of a causal model that takes into account the repressiveness of the regime, governmental acts of coercion, intensity of separatism, and level of economic development.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 425 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1987

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