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Institutions, information, and commitment: the role of democracy in conflict

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  • James T. Bang
  • Aniruddha Mitra

Abstract

This paper explores the hypothesis that both the preexisting quality of democracy in a polity at the onset of conflict and the quality of democracy expected to emerge in the aftermath influence the likelihood of civil war. An empirical investigation of the hypothesis presents a challenge due to concerns of endogeneity and selection: the post-conflict level of democracy is endogenous to the pre-conflict level. Further, for a given time period, either a number of countries have not experienced civil war; or if they did, did not resolve the conflict. We overcome this selection bias by implementing a three-step extension to the Heckman procedure using an unbalanced cross-country panel of 77 countries over the period 1971–2005. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that a standard deviation improvement in the existing level of democracy reduces the probability of civil war by approximately 9 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in expected post-conflict democratization increases the probability of conflict by approximately 48 percentage points.

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  • James T. Bang & Aniruddha Mitra, 2017. "Institutions, information, and commitment: the role of democracy in conflict," Defence and Peace Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(2), pages 165-187, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:defpea:v:28:y:2017:i:2:p:165-187
    DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2016.1142745
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    1. Acemoglu,Daron & Robinson,James A., 2006. "Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521855266.
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    Cited by:

    1. Rajeev K. Goel & James W. Saunoris, 2017. "Political uncertainty and international corruption," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(18), pages 1298-1306, October.
    2. Karim Khan & Sadia Sherbaz, 2020. "Entertaining Douglass North: Political Violence and Social Order," PIDE-Working Papers 2020:174, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.

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