Why do individuals participate in violence, given the potentially high costs
and risks of such behavior? Rather than assuming that local \masses" line up
behind manipulative entrepreneurs, this paper directly investigates the micro-
foundations of individual participation, focusing on sub-national variation in
contemporary Nigeria. Individual involvement in localized violence is explored
using survey responses from the Nigerian Living Standards Survey (NLSS),
survey data on self-reported individual participation in violent demonstrations
drawn from Afrobarometer, and unique data on characteristics of Nigeria's 773
Local Government Areas (LGAs).
The data show that, as in an earlier analysis of riot participation conducted
by the author in Kaduna and Jos, people who are both poor
and
closely linked
into local-level social networks are more likely to participate in violence than
others, controlling for potential confounders. These results hold when look-
ing only at respondents drawn from northern Nigeria and when looking across
Nigeria as a whole. Taking advantage of the large number of LGAs represented
in the dataset, this paper nds preliminary evidence that the local religious
balance also matters: people who live in localities with no clear religious ma-
jority are both more willing to participate in violent demonstrations and are
more likely to have actually participated in violence in the past.