Measuring Political Violence and Land Inequality in Central America

Abstract

The value of cross-national quantitative studies of the relationship between mass political violence and land inequality is challenged along three lines. First, gross and systematic errors in the political violence data of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (the usual data source for empirical studies) render them worthless for Central America at least and probably much of the Third World as well. Second, conceptualizations of land inequality have been too simplistic to be of much theoretical value. Third, the temporal nature of this relationship has been inadequately considered. Responding to such deficiencies, I elaborate a broader understanding of land inequality and provide a fuller discussion of the temporal nature of its relationship to political violence. Throughout, the five nations of Central America are utilized for appropriate case material.