Civil War
and sufficient conditions deriving from a change in a states external or internal environment.
All three are perceptions held by the highest level decision-makers of the actor concerned:
1) a threat to basic values, along with 2) the awareness of finite time for response to the
external value threat, and 3) a high probability of involvement in military hostilities.”
Our measure of civil conflict is taken from the Correlates of War (COW) project’s civil
war data set, which identifies conflicts between state and non-state actors involving more
than 1000 casualties over the course of the conflict, and some minimum level of activity to
be considered ongoing. Although 1000 casualties is a relatively high level that may exclude
many serious forms of civil conflict, the Uppsala armed conflict data (Gleditsch et al., 2002)
— the only real alternative to the COW data — do not at the present have clear enough
start and end dates that we can identify whether conflicts take place before or after leader
changes within the same year.
Finally, our data on leaders are taken from a new data base of political leaders, called
Archigos (Goemans et al., 2004). Archigos identifies the dates of entry and exit of all leaders
of independent states in the international system 1875-2002, and includes information on
the manner of exit and entry of leaders, previous times in office, as well as a leader’s age.
3.2.2
Exogenous variables
We include a series of exogenous variables that we believe should affect one, or potentially
several, of our endogenous variables. First, we consider a series of domestic characteristics of
a country, including political factors such as its regime type, GDP per capita, total population
size, extent of mountainous terrain, ethnic and religious fractionalization, and the size of a
country’s youth bulge relative to adult population. Second, we consider attributes of a
country’s international environment such as the number of borders, outcomes of previous
conflict, and trade openness. Third, we consider various characteristics of leaders, such as
their age, whether their tenure is above or below the median for their country, and the
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Convention