Collaborative Project: 'Minorities at Risk' Database and Explaining Ethnic Violence

Ted R. Gurr 制作的“面临风险的少数群体”数据库已被科学界广泛引用。 它具有作为种族暴力竞争理论的证据仲裁者的巨大潜力。 大规模种族暴力是一个有趣且重要的话题，不仅因为它给人类带来痛苦，而且因为它可能成为解决世界政治目前如何演变的更大难题的重要证据。 此外，国内暴力，尤其是种族暴力现在比传统的国家间暴力更为常见，而且往往比国家间战争更为持久。 由于种族暴力程度越来越高的趋势，并且由于其对政策和世界政治理论的重要性，该合作研究项目的研究人员预计，MAR 数据库将在寻找这种暴力的解释方面发挥越来越重要的作用。尽管其潜力巨大，但研究人员指出了该数据库的一些重大缺陷和局限性。 该项目的首要目的是与 Gurr 团队合作，大幅提高 MAR 数据库的科学质量，以便社会科学界能够拥有比目前更好的资源来研究种族暴力。 该项目的第二个目标是利用新创建的数据库，对族群与国家之间关系的暴力和非暴力案例进行横断面和时间序列比较。 这项工作是对种族群体和国家从冲突转向暴力的机制进行更多理论研究的先决条件。调查人员通过纠正编码错误、使用模糊且几乎无法编码的自变量、缺乏主导种族冲突理论的关键变量以及案例选择中几乎棘手的选择偏差问题，对现有数据库进行了实质性改进。 根据经验，该项目支持研究助理改进旧变量并添加新变量。 从理论上讲，研究人员主张应用计量经济学技术来解决选择偏差。 最终任务提供了研究人员对 MAR 数据进行横断面分析的初步结果，并执行额外的工作来改进数据库。这是一个将在社会科学界广泛使用的数据库。

The "Minorities at Risk" database produced by Ted R. Gurr has been widely cited in the scientific community. It has great potential to serve as the evidentiary arbiter of competing theories of ethnic violence. Large-scale ethnic violence is an interesting and important topic both because of the human suffering it causes and because it could be an important piece of evidence in the larger puzzle of how world politics are now evolving. Furthermore, civil and especially ethnic violence is more common now than is interstate violence of the classical sort, and it tends to be more protracted that interstate wars as well. Because of the trend of greater degrees of ethnic violence, and because of its importance for policy and for theories of world politics, the investigators of this collaborative research project foresee that the MAR database will play an increasingly important role in the search for explanations of this violence.Despite its great potential, the investigators point to some major flaws and limitations in the database. The first purpose of this project is to work with the Gurr team to improve substantially the scientific quality of the MAR data base, such that the social science community will have a much better resource for the study of ethnic violence than is currently available. The second objective of this project is to exploit the newly created database in order to make cross-sectional and time-series comparisons of violent and non-violent cases of relations between ethnic groups and states. This work is a precondition for more theoretical work on the mechanisms that move ethnic groups and states from conflict into violence.The investigators improve substantially on the extant data base by correcting errors in coding, use of vague and almost un-codable independent variables, absence of key variables leading theories of ethnic conflict, and a nearly intractable selection bias problem in the choice of cases. Empirically the project supports research assistants to improve the old variables and to add new ones. Theoretically, the investigators argue for an application of an econometric technique to address the selection bias. The final task offers preliminary results of the investigators' cross-sectional analysis of the MAR data and performs additional work to improve the database.This is a database that will have wide use in the social science community.