Treating all political violence as one class may obscure distinct causal types

Evidence

Even if this is typologically plausible, doing so may be theoretically confusing: as suggested early in this essay, certain kinds of political violence might better be treated as “contingent,” others as “inherent.” We did frequently find such results in the literature, especially between lesser and greater types of strife. For reasons of parsimony, we ought perhaps to resist using this possibility, but evidence might compel resorting to it. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4370

Categorization

• QUESTION: What distinguishes ‘lesser’ from ‘greater’ types of strife such that some look contingent and others inherent? A testable taxonomy worth pursuing.
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how collapsing categories in social science (treating heterogeneous phenomena as one class) produces false null or confusing results.
• XREF: Connects to Tilly’s treatment of all collective actions as a single universe, and echoes typology debates in other fields where lumping vs splitting matters. — connects to: Rare violence in high-capacity democracies is politically magnified precisely because it is rare — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 767; Everyday violence categories obscure causal relations and transformations between types — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 721; Intermittent violent actors must be read against the full political context of their regime — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 220