Explaining The Severity Of Civil Wars By Bethany Lacy

Bethany Lacy looked for an explanation of increase in brutalities of wars in her article, Explaining the Severity of Civil Wars. She starts the essay by explaining her hypothesis that the economic development and the power of the countries military do not play as much as a major role as once believed. Instead states that Non-Democratic countries have a significantly high death rate during wars. Lacy used “the regression controls for variation in conflict duration and population by using the log of each as independent variables”(284). She backed up there hypothesis with the rationale that people in democratic counties generally are generally able to express their opinions about the government and more people are less likely to live in poverty. She broke down …show more content…
Another reason she did this was to be able to test her hypothesis. In order to measure variables she turned to an empirical test of the three groups of variables discussed; state power, regime type, and cultural diversity, as determinants of the number of battle deaths in civil conflicts between 1946 and 2002. Lacy measured the dependent variable as the natural log of the overall fatalities in war. In order to control the variation in conflict and population she used the log of each regression as an independent variable. According to Lacy, measuring the military quality and capacity of the country is the best marker of their ability to protect themselves from insurgency. She also tested GDP and compared to years before wars to be able to adjust to power and inflation (Lacy 282). She tested this hypothesis with a dummy variable for wars beginning during the cold war. Her final variable in the investigation was the state strength. In order to this Lacy tested if rough terrain plays a role in wars. The measurements are valid and reliable because she coded dummy variables to counter act outside factors that could sway the results (Lacy