9 - EMPIRICS II

Summary

We were the ones who directed the partisans. If arrests took place, this meant that we were the denouncers.

Member of rebel local committee, Greece

In this chapter, I test the theory of selective violence and some of its implications primarily against data collected in the Argolid, a region in southern Greece. Taking the village as my unit of analysis, and relying on interviews, judicial archives, and secondary sources, I was able to collect data of high quality and to reconstruct the process of civil war in every locality of this region.

After a description of the research design, I provide background information about the Greek Civil War and the Argolid region along with a short analytic narrative of the civil war in the Argolid. I follow up with descriptive statistics about control, selective violence, and indiscriminate violence and, then, test the theory of selective violence. The results are broadly supportive of the theory. I also discuss the empirical mispredictions. More specifically, the overprediction of violence may be explained by the existence or emergence of a norm of positive reciprocity. Avoiding violence under conditions of stress appears to trigger a norm of positive reciprocity that contributes to the absence of violence in subsequent rounds, even when denunciation is rational. Second, vengeful emotions may explain why the theory sometimes underpredicts violence. Most of the time, revenge tends to take place when the likelihood of retaliation is low.