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Title: When Wealth Encourages Individuals to Fight: Evidence From the American Civil War
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2017
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Abstract: How does personal wealth shape an individuals decision to abandon the democratic process and participate in violent rebellion? Studying the American Civil War and the atrocity of human slavery, we offer competing theoretical accounts for how we should expect individual wealth, in the form of land and slaves, to affect white mens decisions to join the Confederate Army. To resolve these disagreements, we assemble a dataset on roughly 3.9 million white citizens in Confederate states, and we show that slaveowners were more likely to fight in the Confederate Army than non-slaveowners. To see if these links are causal, we exploit a randomized land lottery in 19th-century Georgia. Households of lottery winners owned more slaves in 1850 and were more likely to have sons who fought in the Confederate Army than were households who did not win the lottery. The findings add nuance to our understanding of the relationship between individual wealth, political institutions, and the propensity to engage in civil conflict. Although in general wealthier individuals are less likely to fight in such conflicts, when their wealth is tied to existing institutions that civil conflict threatens, they may in fact be more likely to fight.
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Authors: Hall, Andrew B; Huff, Connor; Kuriwaki, Shiro
Publisher: Harvard University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Poverty and Welfare
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