| Description |
Recent studies of civil war onset emphasize the need to differentiate between hard and soft power as measures of state capacity. To better discriminate between these concepts, Warren proposes a measure for soft power (the "Media Density Index''), which he shows enhances state ability to produce substantial barriers to domestic militarized challenges. In this paper, we build on Warren's findings. We provide one possible measure of hard power---the "M Score''---to contrast with MDI. We find that this measure is insignificant but argue that better measures for hard power must be found. Second, we test an important part of Warren's theory that he neglected---the idea that there are increasing returns on the negative effect of the Media Density Index on the probability of civil war outbreak. We find that this part of his theory does not hold; there is little to no evidence of this type of relationship between MDI and civil war onset. We also provide a measure of civil wars in neighboring states. We find that this variable proves to be a strong predictor for civil wars, indicating that there is reason to doubt the assumption of between-country independence made by Warren and many other scholars of civil war onset.
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