CHAPTER 3: ENDOGENOUS MOBILIZATION THEORY – WHY ELECTORAL
C: Scope Limitations of the Theory – Extant Views on Insurgent Mobilization
Herein, the theorized role of domestic electoral politics directly pertains to the
mobilization and counter mobilization efforts of the insurgents and the incumbent regime, with respect to the people who reside within the state’s borders. As such two important limitations on its potential explanatory scope pertain to the distinction between voluntary and involuntary methods of recruitment, and domestic versus foreign labor supplies. The theorized role that elections play is therefore conceptually constrained to conflicts fought over voluntary popular mobilization of the populace residing within the state under contestation.
This is the predominant basis by which revolutionary entrepreneurs have attempted to challenge sovereign states, and can encompass a variety of preexisting theoretical accountings of rebel group mobilization. For example, both activist and opportunist joiners within Jeremy Weinstein’s (2007) framework select into being either rebel group or state supporters on a voluntary basis. And the autocratic elections literature has argued that electoral institutions aid incumbents both in incorporating policy (Gandhi 2008; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007) and material interests (Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009; Lust-Okar 2005, 2006) into status quo political institutions. Employing a provocation strategy is another tactic insurgents have resorted to in attempting to swell their own ranks; by inciting the state into employing indiscriminate repression (Kuperman 2008; Kydd and Walter 2006), they aim to increase the costs
noncombatants incur for passively supporting the status quo and thus convince them to join the rebellion (Kalyvas and Kocher 2007). Within the framework of the present theory such a tactic would be captured as an attempt to promote a right skewed distribution in popular preferences, shifting the mass function of popular support towards the insurgent’s ideal position and
diminishing the policy distance they would need to concede to appeal to a broader swathe of the population.
However, the dynamics of conflicts that exhibit high levels of forced mobilization (i.e. child soldiering) fall outside of the framework addressed in this project. And while large scale forcible recruitment methods are admittedly an occurrence in a minority of historic
insurgencies, there is some evidence of a recent trend towards the greater incorporation of children into rebel armies. Achvarina and Reich (2006) report that the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia have experienced rates of child soldiers as combatants in excess of 25% and 50%, respectively (2006, 146). Forcible recruitment methods largely obviate the need to appeal to the population as a basis for rebel groups to expand their coalitions, which accordingly limits the direct applicability of the present argument.
That said, the strategic soundness of forcible conscription as an approach to satisfying an insurgency’s human capital requirements is ambiguous. The attempted Communist
insurgency in Greece provides a pertinent example. While the communist party grew in strength during the war against German occupation, it was unable to find sufficient support amongst the population to carry on its cause thereafter.
“Using what forces they had at the end of the war [World War II], taking advantage of the difficult terrain, withdrawing into safe asylum across the satellites’ borders when necessary, the Communist insurgents were able to wage commando-type operations but not true guerrilla warfare; in fact, their infiltrating units had to hide from the population when they could not cow it, and their operations lasted generally as long as the supplies they carried with them. The ELAS was obliged to enlist partisans by force. Whenever the unwilling recruits found the political commissar behind their back less dangerous than the nationalist forces in front, they deserted” (Galula and Nagl 2006, 12)
On the other hand, while even Mao has cautioned against the reliability of forcibly conscripted insurgents, the case of the RUF in Sierra Leone seems to suggest otherwise. Despite the fact that Foday Sankoh, leader of the RUF, was imprisoned for considerable portions of the war; former child soldiers, such as Issa Sesay, advanced to leadership positions and continued running the organization in his absence rather than disbanding as Mao might have predicted.
The second major scope limitation of the present theory pertains to a rebel group’s potential employment of mercenaries, foreign fighters, and foreign state allies as resources for providing supplemental troops. Foreign fighter networks have supplied the human capital necessary to bid up conflicts in several recent cases, including the wars in Iraq and Chechnya (Hegghammer 2010, 2013a, 2013b; Kramer 2004). Similarly, the ability for a relatively small indigenous movement to invoke the assistance of a powerful external ally could also largely preclude the need to expand the scope of domestic appeal (Posen 1993).
An exogenous labor supply allows insurgents to augment their relative lack of local support and potentially escalate a conflict to a threshold which they would otherwise have been incapable of reaching. Furthermore, these additional fighters may be more experienced than domestic recruits in many instances, and therefore reduce even further still the total number of domestic personnel required to successfully challenge an incumbent regime. Conversely
however, the need to seek external assistance may bode poorly for the prospects of an aspiring insurgency, precisely because it indicates a relative dearth of local appeal. “Foreign help is no substitute for sound strategy, however. Soviet and Cuban backed insurgencies in Africa and Central America fared poorly because they could never gain sufficient political traction among indigenous populations” (Record 2007, 133).
While interesting questions in their own right, any further direct engagement with these two issues is left to future research. In the next section, a formalization of endogenous mobilization theory is presented, offering a reconciliation of the two competing mechanisms, political institutionalization and collective action, and yielding support for a clear empirical prediction: electoral states are vastly better situated to triumph against an insurgent uprising. The limit of rational play however, under both the alternative assumptions that incumbents are risk averse and risk acceptant, yields a non-zero residual probability which supports the
competing collective action perspective. As was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the intuition is that states try to strike a delicate balance between hedging against the prospect of being overthrown by diminishing the privileges flowing to regime elites, and redirecting them to the mainstream of the polity.
But adopting such a strategy is not the only pathway to victory, and not every regime will elect to pursue such a policy to the same extent, or even at all. While insurgency has indeed presented as an increasingly potent threat to regime survival in the modern era, it is assuredly not the only existential challenge that a state faces. In contrast to threats such as insurgency, coups present a competing source of intrastate existential challenge; and where as an
insurgency is protracted and asymmetric, coups are symmetric and rapid. And of course, regime leaders must calibrate their institutions to balance against not only domestic adversaries, but also those emanating from beyond their borders in the international anarchic system as well. A distinct possibility is that ‘not all good things go together’, meaning simply that optimizing one’s institutions to face one source of challenge may concomitantly disadvantage you in combatting
another, and as incumbent regimes contemplate how far they can pivot to the center of the political spectrum they must keep in mind the risk of losing their base.24
24 Here again a more complete and satisfying explanation for why some regime types opt to forgo
adopting any sort of elected institutions is a question left to future research. The cursory account presented above would suggest that some regimes are constrained from compromising their status quo policy positions owing to alternative threat sources which may present a more immediate concern than an insurgency. A brief examination of the modern literature on coups however does not readily corroborate this account. The logic is that large selectorate regimes would shift away from selective incentive distribution to a greater emphasis on public goods provision, and concentrated status quo interests would rally to prevent the loss of their future rents. Greater institutionalization has however been linked to a reduction in coup risk (Frantz and Stein 2016), as well as in systems with greater political competition (Lehoucq and Pérez-Liñán 2013). Though in contrast democratic regimes have been linked to a reduced capacity to defend themselves against coup attempts (Bell 2016) and ongoing civil war to a greater propensity of experiencing a coup (Bell and Sudduth 2015). Research on the catalyzing effects of fraudulent elections for coup initiation (Johnson and Thyne 2016; Kuntz and Thompson 2009; Wig and Rød 2016), is consistent with the Collective Action mechanism outlined in this chapter. Table 5-13 in chapter 5 presents evidence on the extent to which regime institutions are a reflection of war difficulty, finding that an incumbent’s electoral status is only minimally linked to the difficulty of their COIN war and is indeed mostly a product of other presently unknown factors.