The most common cause of anocracy is either an autocracy trying to democratize itself under the pressure of intraelite conflict and popular mobilization, or a democracy backsliding into autocracy for similar reasons—the collapse of elite consensus and the rise of populism. But this means that the state in question is already in trouble. The two other precursors of civil war—factionalism and state repression—are similarly (and obviously) signs of structural instability. In other words, the PITF model relies on proximate indicators for predicting civil war, but it doesn’t tell us why a
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