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Replication Data for: Can civilian attitudes predict insurgent violence?

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Can civilian attitudes predict insurgent violence?
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DBSEQC
 
Creator Hirose, Kentaro
Imai, Kosuke
Lyall, Jason
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor of patterns of violence in
civil wars? A prominent debate has emerged among scholars and
practitioners about the importance of winning civilian `hearts and
minds' for influencing their wartime behavior. We argue that such
efforts may have a dark side: insurgents can use pro-counterinsurgent
attitudes as cues to select their targets and tactics. We conduct an
original survey experiment in 204 Afghan villages and establish a
positive association between pro-International Security Assistance
Force attitudes and future Taliban attacks. We extend our analysis to
14,606 non-surveyed villages and demonstrate that our measure of
civilian attitudes improves out-of-sample predictive performance by
20-30\% over a standard forecasting model. The results are especially
strong for Taliban attacks with improvised explosive devices. These
improvements in predictive power remain even after adjusting for
possible confounders, including past violence, military bases, and
development aid.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Civil War
Public Opinion
Survey Experiment
Out-of-sample Prediction
 
Contributor Hirose, Kentaro