ABSTRACT
Large numbers of social scientists have studied political violence since the early 1960s, when the subject, after one of those long hiatuses that characterize its study, was back in vogue. Inherency theories of collective political violence at present are less common than contingency theories. Worse, a positive association turns up between elections and political violence, suggesting, perhaps, that electoral processes activate emotions appropriate also to other outlets. The most manifest "facility" for collective political violence is the ability and willingness of regimes to repress, relative to that of dissidents to be destructive. In any case, an impressive number of studies suggest that there is no simple, direct relationship between rates of socioeconomic change and political violence. The relationship, again, seems unusually ambiguous. Tanter and M. I. Midlarsky found a negative relationship between economic growth and, as they use the term, "revolutions" in Latin America, but a positive relationship in the Middle East and Asia.
