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The Politics of Mass Killing in Autocratic Regimes pp 119–151Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Statistical Analysis of Food Crises and Mass Killing

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Abstract

In this chapter, we build on the empirical foundation we laid Chapter “Urban Development and Mass Killing: A First Look at the Data” to introduce different measures operationalizing food crises. We begin by carefully constructing our first measure using data on price volatility of food commodities. We explain why such food price volatility data are effective in capturing our main theoretical conceptualization of food crises. We then statistically evaluate the interactive effect of the two independent variables of interest—our food volatility crisis indicator and the measure of urban development per capita we derived in Chapter “Urban Development and Mass Killing: A First Look at the Data”—on the probability of localized mass killing. We then repeat this analysis using drought-based measures of food crises, measured at both the country and 0.5-degree grid cell level to illustrate that the results are not driven by potential simultaneity between food price volatility and violence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Bumba Mukherjee

  2. Department of Political Science, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Ore Koren

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  1. Bumba Mukherjee
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  2. Ore Koren
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Correspondence to Bumba Mukherjee .

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Mukherjee, B., Koren, O. (2019). Statistical Analysis of Food Crises and Mass Killing. In: The Politics of Mass Killing in Autocratic Regimes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91758-0_4

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