Institutions and Conflict Resolution. Dealing with Endogeneity

Simon Hug, University of Zurich

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.

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