A political uprising is a traumatic event with profound consequences for the country and its people. It can cause serious injuries and lead to the deaths of a large number of citizens. It also affects the economy, with a decline in foreign investment and a drop in the value of the national currency. It can also result in high levels of poverty and hunger amongst the population.
The onset of political unrest can be difficult to predict, and there are many different explanations for why it occurs. For example, it could be caused by a lack of faith in the government or by corruption. Another possibility is that some citizens feel that their rights are being violated. The use of weapons during a civil unrest can also be a contributing factor.
Using the latest open data sources, we study the effect of economic horizontal inequality on political unrest, defined as protests and riots (see a definition from ACLED, 2019). We use a new technique called Spatial DV to control for spatial autocorrelation and shared cultural history and estimate an association between horizontal inequality and unrest, both violent and non-violent.
Our results suggest that economic inequality is a significant contributor to unrest. This is in line with the idea that a wide gap between what people want to have and what they are capable of getting may prompt them to resort to violence to change the status quo. However, our results do not support grievance-based theories and other explanations based on resource-mobilization and political-opportunity models.