Is there an Autocratic Civil Peace? Authoritarian Regimes and Civil Conflict, 1971–2001

Does the risk of civil war vary among different types of authoritarian regimes? This article uses a new data set compiled by Axel Hadenius and Jan Teorell to examine the occurrence of civil war in four types of authoritarian regimes – military, monarchy, single-party and multiparty autocracies – from 1973 to the present. The answer to the above question is affirmative. Compared to military and limited, multiparty authoritarian regimes, single-party authoritarian regimes have a lower risk of armed conflict. The association between military regimes and civil conflict cannot be attributed to a higher risk of military coups in these regimes. There is thus a substantial variation in the risk of conflict associated with characteristics of the different authoritarian regime types. This suggest the need for a more sophisticated notion of authoritarianism than what we find in existing research on civil conflict.