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

泰德·R·古尔制作的“处于危险中的少数族裔”数据库被科学界广泛引用。它有很大的潜力作为相互竞争的种族暴力理论的证据仲裁者。大规模种族暴力是一个有趣而重要的话题，既是因为它给人类造成的痛苦，也是因为它可能成为世界政治目前如何演变这一更大谜题的重要证据。此外，国内暴力，特别是种族暴力，现在比经典的州际暴力更常见，而且往往比州际战争更持久。由于种族暴力愈演愈烈的趋势，以及其对政策和世界政治理论的重要性，这一合作研究项目的调查人员预计，MAR数据库在寻找暴力解释方面将发挥越来越重要的作用。尽管其潜力巨大，但调查人员指出了数据库中的一些主要缺陷和局限性。该项目的第一个目的是与GURR团队合作，大幅提高MAR数据库的科学质量，使社会科学领域拥有比目前更好的研究族裔暴力的资源。该项目的第二个目标是利用新建立的数据库，对族裔群体和国家之间关系的暴力和非暴力案件进行横断面和时序比较。这项工作是对种族群体和国家从冲突走向暴力的机制进行更多理论研究的前提。调查人员通过纠正编码中的错误、使用模糊和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难以解决的选择偏差问题，在现有数据库上进行了实质性的改进。在经验上，该项目支持研究助理改进旧的变量并添加新的变量。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。最后一项任务提供了调查人员对MAR数据进行横断面分析的初步结果，并进行了额外的工作来改进数据库。这是一个将在社会科学领域广泛使用的数据库。

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.