Summary Of Explaining The Severity Of Civil Wars By Bethany Lacina

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In the article Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars written by Bethany Lacina, goes into detail about the question at hand on why some civil wars are much deadlier than others. The study looks at statistics from 1946 to 2002 on the number of combat deaths in internal conflicts during this time period. With the article being published in 2006. Statistics on battle deaths by era, conflict type, and region are used to test state strength, regime type, and cultural characteristics to determine the appropriate answer to the hypothesis being tested. The article makes it obvious that democracies are associated with fewer deaths and fewer internal conflicts. The theory that this article presents is that civil conflict is the most common form of warfare with some conflicts being more deadly than others. This can be related to the …show more content…

With panel measurements incorporated. This research design is appropriate to the study at hand because one cannot recreate civil wars that have already taken place. Experiments on these past events are not possible. One cannot stage or fake deaths in order to test a hypothesis and come up with a conclusion. Thus making this research design an observational study. The researcher does balance internal and external validity appropriately, having used an observational study they are limited to high levels of internal validity but are able to have high levels of external validity. Their internal validity is limited to individual populations that faced civil wars and their external validity is limited to the collective data from all the individual populations that faced civil wars. Thus their external validity can be assumed for all countries in the world due to using a majority of countries in the study. But their internal validity applies only to the data collected about individual