He hypothesizes & empirically establishes that statehood experience, accumulated over a period of up to six millennia, lies at the deep roots of the spatial distribution of political instability across non-European countries

State history and political instability: The disadvantage of early state development. Trung V. Vu. Kyklos, March 15 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12331

Abstract: This article hypothesizes and empirically establishes that statehood experience, accumulated over a period of up to six millennia, lies at the deep roots of the spatial distribution of political instability across non-European countries. Using the state history index measured between 3,500 BCE and 2000 CE, I consistently obtain precise estimates that long-standing states outside Europe, relative to their newly established counterparts, are characterized by greater political uncertainty. I postulate that a very long duration of state experience impeded the transplantation of inclusive political institutions by European colonizers, which would eventually become central to shaping countries' ability to establish politically stable regimes outside Europe. The core findings place emphasis on the long-term legacy of early state development for contemporary political instability.

5.3.2 Robustness to controlling for population diversity

It has been established that population diversity plays a central role in explaining the prevalence of social and political unrest worldwide. The underlying intuition is that countries characterized by higher degrees of population diversity, captured by ethnolinguistic fractionalization or polarization, are more likely to suffer from mistrust and the under-provision of public goods, thus increasing political uncertainty (Blattman & Miguel, 2010; Fearon & Laitin, 2003). A recent study by Arbatlı et al. (2020) finds that historically determined population diversity, measured by heterogeneity in the composition of genetic traits within populations, is a fundamental determinant of civil conflicts around the world. Accordingly, population diversity is positively associated with heterogeneity in preferences for public goods provision; it is therefore more difficult for the governments of highly diverse societies to reconcile such large heterogeneity and resolve collective action problems (Arbatlı et al., 2020). This line of argument suggests that my findings can be confounded by population diversity. This motivates the inclusion of three measures of population diversity in the regression. More specifically, I account for the variation in ethnic fractionalization (Alesina et al., 2003), ethnolinguistic polarization (Desmet et al., 2012), and predicted genetic diversity (Ashraf & Galor, 2013) across non-European countries. As shown in Table 6, the main results retain their signs and statistical significance, suggesting that the inclusion of population heterogeneity in the regression fails to explain away the long-term influence of state history on political instability outside Europe.