Political Institutions and Ethnic Conflict Resolution: Dealing
with the Endogenous Nature of Institutions1
Thomas Christin2 and Simon
Hug3
CIS,
IPZ, Universität Zürich
Paper prepared for presentation at the
ISA conference in San Diego,
March 21-25, 2006
May 14, 2008
Abstract
It is often argued that political institutions such as the level of
democratization, consociationalism, federalism or the electoral system
are able to mitigate ethnic conflict. However, these institutions have
often been adopted in many countries to overcome social conflicts.
Therefore, their presence is part and parcel of the explanation of
societal conflicts. Empirically, political institutions thought to
mitigate conflict are often not exogenous but nevertheless are treated
as such in empirical analyses. Relying on previous empirical work on
ethnic conflicts that include political institutions, we demonstrate how
dealing with the endogenous nature of institutions leads to substantive
different conclusions for many research questions on ``minorities at
risk.''
Footnotes:
1 We wish to thank Pat
Regan for making available his dataset that we use in this paper, and
Frank Cohen for trying to do the same thing.
2 PhD candidate at the Institute of
Political Science, University of St. Gallen, and Institute of Political
Science, University of Zürich, Switzerland, Hirschengraben 56, 8001
Zürich, Switzerland; email: christin@pwi.unizh.ch; phone +41 (0)44 634 50
92; fax: +41 (0)44 634 50 98; email: christin@pwi.unizh.ch
3 Institut für Politikwissenschaft; Universität Zürich;
Hirschengraben 56; 8001 Zürich; Switzerland; phone +41 (0)44 634 50
90/1; fax: +41 (0)44 634 50 98; email: simon.hug@access.unizh.ch
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