The Underreported Death Toll of Wars: Results from an Expert Elicitation

• In Event: Limitations and Advances in Conflict Data

Abstract

Event datasets on organized political violence have become staples of peace and conflict research, as they enable macro-level, comparative studies of armed conflicts. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is one of the most acknowledged and used sources of data on political violence, covering events globally throughout the period 1989--2021. UCDP provides high-quality data, which are systematically collected, consistent with a rigorous and immutable definition of conflict, and comparable across cases and countries. However, event datasets including those provided by UCDP are based on reports from the media and international organizations, which can cause reporting bias. The extent of this bias remains largely unknown. Since the UCDP has strict inclusion criteria, they most likely under-estimate conflict-related deaths, but we do not know by how much. Although a nascent literature has documented the existence of reporting bias and its implications in conflict research, these analyses are limited to a single country, and do not give a comprehensive estimate of how many conflict fatalities are undocumented. The present study seeks to provide a first generalizable, cross-national, estimate of the measurement uncertainty in conflict fatalities. We use a structured expert elicitation based on the IDEA protocol to obtain UCDP coders' probabilistic assessment of the true number of fatalities, given the number of documented fatalities and the type of event. These assessments are then used to quantify the uncertainty around the true value and to create parametric distributions for the true number of fatalities of any given event. The results give insight on the true underlying patterns behind the reported estimates of violence and shed light on the magnitude of the measurement uncertainty in UCDP data, which can help scholars understand the extent of bias affecting their empirical analyses of political violence.

Authors

• Paola Vesco, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

• Håvard Hegre, Peace Research Institute Oslo

• David Randahl, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University

• Stina Högbladh, Department of Peace and Conflict Research