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The provision of private goods and the emergence of armed rebellion: the case of the Slovak National Uprising 1944–1945

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Abstract

Can authoritarian leaders maintain support for their rule by providing private goods to selected individuals? Current theories disagree regarding this. While the selectorate theory argues that, in undemocratic regimes, leaders should provide private goods selectively to remain in office, civil war research suggests the opposite. Through a case study of the Slovak National Uprising, using both qualitative and quantitative evidence, this paper shows that the provision of private goods may fuel resentment against the regime and thus increase the risk of armed rebellion. This finding suggests that reliance on the selectorate theory may be fatal for regimes.

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Notes

  1. Collier (2009) argues that today autocracies hold elections to keep up pretence of democracy, but frequently rig them. In some countries (such as Saudi Arabia), the selectorate is equal to the members of the royal family.

  2. While Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) talk of a leader, we can of course assume that the same applies to political leadership in general (parties and regimes).

  3. Humphreys and Weinstein (2008) provide excellent evidence that the reasons for mobilisation are not mutually exclusive.

  4. All translations from Slovak have been made by the author.

  5. There are three main reasons for this: (1) as a consequence of independence, Czechs were forced out of numerous positions in public administration and services, and these positions were filled by Slovak citizens; (2) as a consequence of the First Vienna Award, Slovakia lost much of its territory in the South to Hungary and in the North to Poland (although much less to the latter than to the former), cutting transport infrastructure connecting the country’s West to its East, which needed to be rebuilt; and (3) Slovak industry became a workhorse for the German war effort.

  6. See Hallon (2007) for a brief overview of the legislation and Kamenec (1991) for the definitive historical account. Owing to missing data, the present paper does not deal with the dispossession of petty assets such as jewellery, cash or artworks that were seized by the government or were sold to the local population.

  7. Whether or not the Slovak government knew about the fate of Jews in German concentration camps is a major topic of debate among the historians of the period. Nevertheless, this discussion is largely irrelevant for this paper and I shall not even approach it.

  8. On the other hand, the regime never carried out a land reform which many had hoped for (Kamenec 2011).

  9. On the resistance side. There are no readily available data about the losses of German and government forces.

  10. In Figure 1, the borders of the districts do not represent exactly the borders of the districts at that time, as no map of the districts from that period is available. I have, therefore, created Thiessen polygons of individual territorial units (villages, towns, cities) and then dissolved the internal borders at the district level. This level of precision, I believe, is quite sufficient for the present purposes.

  11. For a variety of reasons, the list includes those who died abroad, such as resistance members who fought abroad and those who were captured and killed in concentration camps for their activities and so on

  12. Subsequent analysis is robust to a replacement of Roman Catholics with Protestants.

  13. As opposed to those of Jewish nationality. Jews in the period stated frequently that their nationality was Hungarian, German or Slovak, even though ‘Jewish’ nationality could be selected (Klamková 2010b).

  14. For robustness checks, I rerun all the models with a jackknife estimate of standard errors. The basic principle of jackknifing is that the full original sample is re-sampled systematically leaving out one observation every turn and then averaging out the results. All the results are confirmed in the robustness checks except for Models 2 and 4. This may simply be because of the small size of the sample, given that the general tendency is confirmed again in Models 2a and 4a, including in the jackknifed estimates. Furthermore, I re-run Models 1–4 without outliers (observations with leverage above 0.3 and Pearson residual above 2). All the main results hold. The results can be found in the online appendix.

  15. For brevity, I do not report the odds ratios in this paper, but the respective tables are available in the online appendix.

  16. As a reviewer pointed out rightly, Slovakia is a fairly small country and ‘we are not talking about the Congo’.

  17. Although this support base was not equal to the HSĽS’s co-religionists or former voters.

  18. The effect is captured even better graphically in the Online Appendix Figure 1. Online Appendix Figure 2, based on Model 2a, shows the likelihood of the emergence of rebellion at varying strengths depending on the size of the local Jewish population before the war while keeping other variables at their means.

  19. Ward (2002) reports that approximately 1,000 such exemptions were issued.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Vratko Strmeň, Martina Gonosová and Gabriela Onderčová for assistance in data collection. The author is thankful to the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica for generously sharing their casualty data. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Research in Security and Conflict colloquium at the University of Amsterdam and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The author would also like to thank the attendees at these meetings, the three excellent JIRD reviewers, as well as Scott Abramson, Hana Kubátová, Gary Marks, Andrea Ruggeri, Jeremiah Trinidad-Christensen, Andrej Tušičišny, Wolfgang Wagner and James Ward for excellent advice on the earlier drafts of the paper. Alyson Price and David Frank Barnes proofread the paper with much care. The EUI library could not have been more helpful in tracking down literature sources from libraries all over Europe. All mistakes remain my own. Replication package and online appendix are available from the author’s website http://www.mwpweb.eu/MichalOnderco/.

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  1. Max Weber Programme, European University Institute, Via Dei Roccettini 9, San Domenico Di Fiesole (Fi), I-50014, Italy

    Michal Onderco

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Onderco, M. The provision of private goods and the emergence of armed rebellion: the case of the Slovak National Uprising 1944–1945. J Int Relat Dev 19, 76–100 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2015.30

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