Institutions and Conflict Resolution:
Dealing with Endogeneity
Thomas Christin1 and Simon Hug2
IPW, Universität St.Gallen
Jul 24, 2005
Paper prepared for presentation at the
ISA conference March 1-5, 2005, Hawaii
Abstract
Increasingly scholars and practitioners put hope into power-sharing
institutions like federalism, decentralization and consociationalism to
solve ethnic conflicts or civil wars. Both the theoretical and empirical
underpinnings for such hopes are, however, quite weak. Empirical work
looking at how institutions affect the onset and resolution of civil
wars, or the rebellious nature of ``minorities at risk'' starts most
often with the implicit assumption that institutions are exogenous.
With respect to most institutions of power-sharing and the type of
analysis that interests us, such an assumption is tenuous. In this paper
we discuss in detail the problems related to the endogenous nature of
institutions and provide empirical illustrations of how established
empirical results are affected when taking the endogeneity problem into
account.
Footnotes:
1 Institut für Politikwissenschaft;
Universität St. Gallen; Dufourstrasse 45; 9000 St. Gallen;
Switzerland; phone +41 (0)71 224 2600; fax: +41 (0)71 224 2974; email:
thomas.christin@unisg.ch
2 Institut für
Politikwissenschaft; Universität St. Gallen; Dufourstrasse 45; 9000
St. Gallen; Switzerland; phone +41 (0)71 224 2608; fax: +41 (0)71 224
2974; email: simon.hug@unisg.ch
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