POLI 360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Shining Path, Moral Hazard, Collective Action
Document Summary
Last class we saw collective action problem: fighting is costly so you have an incentive to sit out civil wars (why free riders get punished) Actors will only join the fight if everyone else is going. Fear that if i fight i will be left on my own. Both sides need to think about how to make their troops believe that reinforcements/help are coming in order to not disincentivize their troops (worry that they might switch sides) Political alliances as a means, not an end: Remember that at the micro level most motivations are not political, they are personal. Taliban in afghanistan most people not that crazy, but they accept rule because it was better than the warlords before. Signal strength; then troops switch sides to the stronger one. * foreign fighters included in ideological group, but even still percentage of total fighters fighting for ideological reasons is much smaller than the others!
