Win, Lose, or Draw: Predicting the Outcome of Civil Wars

T. David Mason · Joseph P. Weingarten · Patrick J. Fett

212 citations0/0 files storedPolitical Research Quarterly

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Political Conflict and Governance Electoral Systems and Political Participation Military History and Strategy

Abstract

What characteristics of a civil war determine whether it will end in a government victory, a rebel victory, or a negotiated settlement? To explore this question we present an expected utility model of the choice rebels and governments face between accepting a settlement or continuing to fight. The model implies that a settlement becomes more likely as (1) estimates of the probability of victory decline; (2) costs of conflict increase; (3) estimates of the time required to win increase; or (4) the utility from a settlement increases relative to that of victory. Factors that (1) increase one party's probability of victory; (2) increase its payoffs from victory; (3) reduce the costs of conflict; and/or (4) reduce the time required to achieve victory increase that party's probability of winning and decrease the likelihood of a settlement. We test these propositions with a multinomial choice model that correctly predicts the outcome in 86 percent of the cases.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 212 citations exist upstream.

References

1986The theory and practice of econometrics 1970Why men rebel 1997The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement 1995The Rebel's Dilemma 1995The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945–1993 1989The Political Economy of Death Squads: Toward a Theory of the Impact of State-Sanctioned Terror 1996The Duration of Interstate Wars, 1816–1985 1996How Civil Wars End

Cited by

2011When Civil Wars Recur: Conditions for Durable Peace after Civil Wars 2014Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars 2003Civil War Settlements and the Implementation of Military Power-Sharing Arrangements 2007Bargaining, Bias and Peace Brokers: How Rebels Commit to Peace 2010Civil War Contagion and Neighboring Interventions1 2009Incentives for Talking: Accepting Mediation in International and Civil Wars

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.