Land tenure inequality, harvests, and rural conflict ... - e-Archivo

have relied on newspapers and qualitative information to illuminate various aspects of
collective action (Earl et al., 2004: 66; Franzosi, 1987). Newspaper research has been
instrumental in several path-breaking studies of protest and social movements such as
the Tarrow (1989), McAdam (1982) or Tilly (1979, 1995).
However, in the case of newspapers, selection and description biases need to
be taken seriously: censorship and government control is always an issue in countries
with a short tradition of independent journalism. Moreover, newspapers selectively
report events depending on their intrinsic interest to readers and probably ideological
biases, which can distort the information given on the event (Earl et al., 2004: 67).
In this paper, I have tried to identify the conflict episodes in more than one
source (not always possible) and have relied on sources of information that historians
have identified as trustworthy. Moreover, I have used the available information in
ways that minimize description biases. For example, I focus on the strict counting of
events rather than on using information on outcomes or participation in the event wich
could be subject to important inaccuracies. Strict event counts follow the strategy of
Hobsbawm and Rudé (1973), Markoff (1985, 1986, 1996), Alston, Libecap and
Mueller (2000), and, to a great extent, Hidalgo, Naidu and Richardson (2010).
However, one can argue that the number of events and the intensity of
conflict are not necessarily highly correlated. In fact several authors stress that the
intensity of conflict could be proxied by the proportion of participants in the conflict
episode in the relevant population (for example the number of strikers in the overall
labor force of a firm or a sector or the proportion of the local population involved in
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