Beyond the Civil Democratic Peace: Subnational Political ... · Beyond the Civil Democratic Peace:...

Beyond the Civil Democratic Peace:

Subnational Political Institutions

and Internal Armed Conflict

Tore [email protected]

Department of Political Science

Faculty of Social Sciences

University of Oslo

Advisors:

Professor H̊avard Hegre

Professor Carl Henrik Knutsen

April 2015

Contents

List of Figures 9

List of Tables 11

Acknowledgements 3

1 Institutions and Civil Peace in Weak States 7

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

1.1.1 Crucial definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

1.2 The institutional causes of conflict: The case for a subnational approach 11

1.2.1 Subnational institutions in weak states: Beyond methodological

statism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

1.2.2 Customary institutions: Ashanti in Ghana . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

1.2.3 Formal local government institutions: The Boko Haram insurgency

in Nigeria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

1.3 Conceptual framework: Institutional attributes, ethnic groups and conflict 23

1.3.1 Institutions as rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

1.3.2 Institutional attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

1.3.3 Ethnic groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

1.3.4 Internal armed conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

1.4 Theoretical framework: The conflict ladder and the role of institutions . 27

1.4.1 The individual level: Rationality and motivations . . . . . . . . . 28

1.4.2 The organizational level: Groups as unitary actors . . . . . . . . . 29

1.4.3 The bargaining level: Obstacles to agreements short of war . . . . 30

1.4.4 How institutions solve bargaining problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

1.5 Measuring institutions and conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

1.5.1 Data on subnational institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

1.5.2 Varieties of internal conflict data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

1.6 Reaching conclusions: Philosophy and methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

1.6.1 Causal explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

1.6.2 Methodological framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

1.7 Structure of the thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

1.7.1 Part I: National institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

1.7.2 Part II: Customary institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

1.7.3 Part III: Formal local government institutions . . . . . . . . . . . 47

1.8 Implications for research and policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

I National Institutions 51

2 Do Liberal Institutions Pacify? A Predictive Validation Analysis of

Institutional Arguments for Civil Peace 53

2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

2.2 Liberal institutional explanations for civil conflict: Democracy, quality of

government and the rule of law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

2.3 Predictive evaluation: Why and how . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

2.3.1 Metrics for evaluating predictive accuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

2.3.2 How to evaluate out-of-sample performance . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

2.4 Research design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

2.4.1 Measuring institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

2.4.2 Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

2.5 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

2.5.1 In-sample validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

2.5.2 Out-of-sample validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

2.5.3 Where does the liberal model miss? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

2.5.4 Alternative explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

II The Role of Subnational Customary Institutions 85

3 Peace from the Past: Pre-Colonial Political Institutions and Civil Wars

in Africa 87

3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

3.2 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

3.2.1 Classifying pre-colonial institutions: The centralized-decentralized

dimension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

3.2.2 The modern impact of pre-colonial institutions . . . . . . . . . . . 91

3.3 Pre-colonial institutions and civil war . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

3.4 Research design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

3.4.1 Unit of analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

4

3.4.2 Dependent variable: Ethnic armed conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

3.4.3 Independent variable: Pre-colonial centralization . . . . . . . . . . 96

3.4.4 Controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

3.5 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

3.5.1 Statistical models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

4 Which Groups Fight? Customary Institutions and Communal Conflicts

in Africa 109

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

4.2 Current explanations of communal conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

4.3 Customary institutions and ethnic groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

4.4 Institutional explanations for war applied to traditional institutions . . . 115

4.5 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

4.5.1 Unit of analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

4.5.2 Communal conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

4.5.3 Customary institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

4.5.4 Controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

4.6 Estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126

4.6.1 Controlling for alternative pathways . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

4.6.2 Predictive power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

4.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134

III The Role of Formal Local Government Institutions 137

5 Subnational Institutional Quality and Local Conflict Violence in Africa139

5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

5.2 Institutional quality and conflict: State of the art . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

5.3 Why local institutional quality pacifies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

5.4 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

5.4.1 Local institutional quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

5.4.2 Conflict-related violence events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

5.4.3 Controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

5.5 Baseline results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

5.5.1 Endogeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

5.5.2 Alternative model specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

5.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

6 The Institutional Legacies of Local Conflict Violence: Perception-Based

Evidence from the Afrobarometer Surveys 163

6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

6.2 The institutional effects of local conflict: State of the art . . . . . . . . . 165

5

6.2.1 Institutional persistence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

6.2.2 Conflict-induced decay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

6.2.3 Conflict as a catalyst for institutional development . . . . . . . . 169

6.3 Research design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

6.3.1 Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

6.3.2 Perceptions of institutional quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

6.3.3 Conflict exposure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

6.3.4 Empirical strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174

6.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

6.4.1 Corruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

6.4.2 Trust in local institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

6.4.3 Threshold and cumulative effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

6.4.4 Robustness and conditional effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188

6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

IV Appendices and Bibliography 191

7 Appendix to Chapter 2 193

7.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

7.2 Descriptive statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

7.3 Additional controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

7.4 Analyses when democracy is endogenized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

7.5 Comparing predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197


8.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

8.2 The dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

8.2.1 Matching the Ethnographic Atlas to EPR (the EA2EPR dataset) 203

8.2.2 Validity and reliability of the Ethnographic Atlas data . . . . . . 206

8.3 List of variables: Sources and operationalizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

8.3.1 Afrobarometer variables (used in validity check in Appendix) . . . 209

8.4 Summary statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210

8.5 Predictive power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

8.6 Controlling for additional group traits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

8.7 Multiple imputation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

8.8 Removing influential observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

8.9 Adressing endogeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

8.10 Alternative unit of analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

8.11 Controlling for relative size and MEG power-status . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

8.12 Random intercept instead of country dummies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

6


9.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

9.2 Matching the UCDP communal conflict data to EPR . . . . . . . . . . . 227

9.3 Analysis of FCI branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

9.4 Count models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

9.5 Descriptives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

9.6 List of regions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

9.7 List of matched EPR groups with communal conflict . . . . . . . . . . . 233


10.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

10.2 Creating the dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

10.2.1 Descriptions of main variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

10.2.2 Controls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

10.2.3 Factor analysis investigating local institutional quality dimension 241

10.3 Descriptive statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

10.4 Matching diagnostics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

10.5 Sensitivity tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

10.5.1 Alternative functional form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

10.5.2 Removing extreme cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

10.5.3 Removing low-respondent cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

10.5.4 Additional control variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

10.5.5 Parsimonious models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

10.5.6 Additional hurdle model for round 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

10.5.7 Modeling survey risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

10.6 Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261


11.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

11.2 Variable descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

11.2.1 Dependent variables from Afrobarometer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

11.3 Descriptives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

11.4 Excluding random intercepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

11.5 Lag length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

11.6 No post-treatment variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274

11.7 Casualties instead of event counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

11.8 Cumulative conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

11.9 Conditional effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

11.10Region dummies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

11.11Countries included . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

12 Bibliography 285

7

List of Figures

1.1 Murdock’s ethnographic map of pre-colonial polities in Africa . . . . . . 17

1.2 Ghana (red border) and contemporary Ashantiland (green border) . . . . 20

1.3 GED conflict events (1989-2010) overlaid on country borders . . . . . . . 39

2.1 In-sample ROC and Precision Recall curves for a standard civil-war onset

model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

2.2 In-sample AUROC and AUPR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

2.3 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR (cross-validation runs=1000) . . . . . 73

2.4 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR (cross-validation runs=1000) . . . . . 74

2.5 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR with different regions as test sets . . 76

2.6 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR with young regimes as test sets . . . 79

2.7 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR with large countries as test sets . . . 80

2.8 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR comparisons to baseline with income

removed (cross-validation runs=1000) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

3.1 Murdock‘s map of pre-colonial ethnic institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

3.2 Predicted probabilities of ethnic armed conflict onset when Pre-colonial

CentralizationMEG increases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

4.1 Descriptives for FCI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

4.2 Simulated probability of dyad-level communal conflict for different levels

of FCI, 1989-2013 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

4.3 Distribution of coefficient estimates from Bayesian model averaging . . . 132

4.4 In-sample predictive power for models with and without institutional vari-

ables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

5.1 Map showing the distribution of Local Institutional Quality (district level)

in Afrobarometer rounds 3 and 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

5.2 Institutional quality at national level (World Bank) and national means of

Local Institutional Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

5.3 Map showing the distribution of Local Institutional Quality (administrative-

district level) in Uganda and Nigeria, round 3, and GED conflict events . 151

5.4 Map showing the continental distribution of Local Institutional Quality

(district level), round 3, and GED conflict events . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

5.5 Expected count of GED-events in a district in the post-survey period . . 156

6.1 All survey clusters (2005,2008 and 2012) and all conflict events (1989-2010) 172

6.2 Looking for threshold effects: Experienced and perceived corruption . . . 185

6.3 Looking for threshold effects: Trust in local institutions . . . . . . . . . . 186

7.1 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR comparisons to baseline with added

control variables (cross-validation runs=1000) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194

7.2 Out-of-sample AUROC and AUPR comparisons to baseline when Democ-

racy is endogenized using WAVE (cross-validation runs=1000) . . . . . . 195

8.1 In-sample ROC plots showing improvements in predictive accuracy . . . 212

8.2 Distributions of out-of-sample AUC values from 100 cross-validation runs

without and with Pre-colonial CentralizationMEG . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

10.1 Scatterplots of Local Institutional Quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

10.2 Distribution of Local Institutional Quality (Afrobarometer rounds 3 and 4) 245

10.3 Administrative districts, round 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

10.4 Administrative districts, round 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

10

List of Tables

1.1 Survey items capturing perceptions of local institutional quality from the

Afrobarometer survey (round 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

1.2 Communal conflicts by world region, 1989-2013 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

2.1 Concepts, variables and factor loadings on common dimension . . . . . . 67

2.2 Logit models of conflict onset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

3.1 Bivariate correlations between pre-colonial centralization and various group-

level traits (group is the unit of analysis, N=243) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

3.2 Logit Models of the probability of ethnic armed conflict onset in EGIP-

MEG dyads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

3.3 Cross-sectional logit and OLS models of ethnic armed conflict onsets (bi-

nary and count) in EGIP-MEG dyads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

3.4 Logit models of the probability of ethnic armed conflict onset in EGIP-

MEG dyads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

4.1 Correlations between customary institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

4.2 Descriptive statistics main independent variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

4.3 Logit model of communal conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127

4.4 Linear models of log(communal conflicts+.001) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

5.1 Negative binomial count models regressing GED events on the quality of

local institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

5.2 Negative binomial count models of GED events when observations are

matched on conflict history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

5.3 Hurdle model (rounds 3 and 4 combined) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

6.1 Overview of hypotheses linking conflict to institutional quality, and related

mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170

6.2 Items used to tap perceptions of institutional quality . . . . . . . . . . . 173

6.3 Sample means of outcome variables in conflict vs. non-conflict areas . . . 178

6.4 Random-intercept GLS models of corruption experiences . . . . . . . . . 179

6.5 Random-intercept GLS models of corruption perceptions . . . . . . . . . 180

6.6 Random-intercept GLS models of trust in police and politicians . . . . . 182

6.7 Summary: Estimated relationships for items capturing perceptions of in-

stitutional quality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

6.8 Random-intercept GLS models investigating effect of long-term conflict on

institutional quality items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

7.1 Fist stage OLS regression where Democracy is regressed on WAVE and

baseline covariates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

7.2 Comparing predictions (for onset cases) from baseline and liberal institu-

tions models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

7.3 Continued: Comparing predictions (for onset cases) from baseline and lib-

eral institutions models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198









8.1 Matching EPR to Ethnographic Atlas: Matched cases by matching criteria 205

8.2 OLS estimates of associations between Pre-colonial Centralization of re-

spondents ethnic group and affirmation of authority of traditional rulers . 207

8.3 Summary stats of main variables used in the paper and in the appendix . 210

8.4 Logit models of ethnic armed conflict onset, controlling for additional group

traits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

8.5 Comparing models run on imputed and unimputed data . . . . . . . . . 216

8.6 Models with influential observations removed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

8.7 First-stage reduced form estimates: Pre-colonial CentralizationMEG re-

gressed on Ecological DiversityMEG and covariates . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

8.8 IV probit models where Pre-colonial CentralizationMEG is instrumented

by Ecological DiversityMEG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220

8.9 Logit models of ethnic armed conflict onset with group-year as unit of

analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

8.10 Logit models of ethnic armed conflict onset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

8.11 Random intercept logit models of ethnic armed conflict onset with dyad-

year as unit of analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

12

9.1 Snippet of dataset matching communal conflicts to EPR groups . . . . . 229

9.2 Logit models of communal conflict using FCI-branches instead of FCI . . 230

9.3 Poisson and negative binomial count models of communal conflict onsets,

1989-2012 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

9.4 Regions and countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

9.5 List of EPR groups involved in communal conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

9.6 Continued: List of EPR groups involved in communal conflict . . . . . . 235

10.1 Factor loadings from a factor analysis with 4 factors . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

10.2 Descriptive statistics (Afrobarometer round 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243

10.3 Descriptive statistics (Afrobarometer round 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244

10.4 Covariate balance (pre- and post matching), when matching on conflict

history (Afrobarometer round 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

10.5 Covariate balance (pre- and post matching), when matching on conflict

history (Afrobarometer round 4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

10.6 Table 1 above replicated with Poisson models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

10.7 Dropping the most intense conflict areas and re-estimating the core models 250

10.8 Dropping low-respondent districts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252

10.9 Additional control variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

10.10Parsimonious models, round 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

10.11Parsimonious models, round 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256

10.12Hurdle model, round 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

10.13Logit models of survey-location (unit-of-analysis=PRIO-GRID cells) . . . 259

10.14Core models, with survey-risk as a covariate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261

11.1 GLS and 2SLS models of corruption experience without random intercepts 268



11.4 GLS and 2SLS models of corruption experience with different lag lengths 271

11.5 GLS and 2SLSmodels of corruption perceptions with different lag lengths 272

11.6 GLS and 2SLS models of trust in institutions with different lag lengths . 273

11.7 GLS and 2SLS models of corruption experience w/post-treatment bias can-

didates removed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274

11.8 GLS and 2SLS models of corruption perceptions w/post-treatment bias

candidates removed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275

11.9 GLS and 2SLS models of trust in institutions w/post-treatment bias can-

didates removed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276

11.10GLS and 2SLS models of experienced corruption, with casualties instead

of event counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

11.11GLS and 2SLS models of corruption perceptions, with casualties instead

of event counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278

11.12GLS and 2SLS models of trust in institutions, with casualties instead of

event counts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

13

11.13GLS models investigating effect of long-term conflict on institutional qual-

ity items . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

11.14Random-intercept GLS models investigating conditional effects: Interac-

tions with homeland of excluded ethnic group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

11.15Random-intercept GLS models investigating conditional effects: Interac-

tions with log distance to capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282

11.16GLS models with region-fixed effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

11.17Countries included in the surveys and number of respondents . . . . . . . 284

14

Tore Wig 1

1University of Oslo and Peace Research Institute Oslo, PRIO, email: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

If this thesis has a bumper sticker, it must surely be “institutions matter”. When this

document is printed I will have spent close to ten years of my life in the institution that

is the University of Oslo. To say that this institution has mattered to me would be a

huge understatement. I will therefore start by acknowledging the University of Oslo, and

the Department of Political Science, for shaping me into a walking piece of evidence for

beneficial institutional effects.

A long list of people have contributed directly or indirectly to this work, and deserve

to be mentioned.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisers, H̊avard and Carl Henrik,

who have been the most important contributors to my development as a political scientist

and to the completion of this thesis. H̊avard was the one who first trusted my abilities

as a researcher, and hired me at PRIO. He was the first one to encourage me to do a

PhD, and he has supported me ever since. Without him, I would never have gotten into

conflict research, or gone the (informal) “PRIO school” that has been so crucial to my

development as a researcher. Carl Henrik has been my indispensable go-to guy at UiO.

If it had not been for him, I would never have learned how to get stuff published, or

thrived as well as I have at the department. You have both provided me with excellent

guidance, and – perhaps more importantly – served as role models and facilitators. You

have introduced me to the people, high standards, methods, and mindsets of the world

class political science community you are both important contributors to. You have both

been great supervisors, friends, and collaborators. I owe you a great debt!

Two institutions have served as my academic homes. My primary home has been the

Department of Political Science at UiO, and my second has been the Peace Research Insti-

tute Oslo, PRIO. From the UiO, I would like to mention the long list of senior colleagues

who have provided me with inspiration and guidance throughout these years; Bjørn Høy-

land, Jostein Askim, Raino Malnes, Elin Allern, Øyvind Østerud, Øivind Bratberg, Jon

Hovi, Dag Einar Thorsen, Anders Jupsk̊as, Arild Underdal, H̊avard Strand, Helge Holter-

mann, Kim Angell, and Robert Huseby. Credit also goes to the excellent group of fellow

Phd-students and friends that I have studied with. You have all contributed to a great

working environment.

At PRIO, I would like to thank all the brilliant researchers that have been such an

inspiration to me, and without which I would never have learned how to do conflict

research properly: Gudrun Østby, Ragnhild Nord̊as, Helga Malmin Binningsbø, Halvard

Buhaug, Scott Gates, Siri Aas Rustad, Øysten Rolandsen, Marianne Dahl, Jeff Checkel,

H̊avard Mokleiv Nyg̊ard, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Jonas Nordkvelle, Kristian Gleditsch,

Andreas Tollefsen, Ida Rudolfsen, Idunn Kristiansen, and Henrik Urdal. I would also like

to thank Cathrine Bye, for making me feel at home at PRIO.

In this project, and others, I have collaborated with a number of excellent scholars

and colleagues. In this respect, I would like to thank Espen Geelmuyden Rød, Sirianne

Dahlum, H̊avard Nyg̊ard, Carl Henrik, Marianne Dahl, Daniela Kromrey, Andreas Forø

Tollefsen, Øyvind Stiansen, Andreas Kotsadam, Eivind Hammersmark Olsen, Pat Regan,

John Gerring, Magnus Rasmussen, and Øyvind Skorge, for collaborating with me on

various projects.

Several people have been important to this project through providing comments at

presentations and after reading through parts of the manuscript. I would especially like

to thank the PRIOites mentioned above, all of whom have provided comments on various

papers I have presented at PRIO brownbags. I would also like to thank Øyvind Østerud,

Bjørn Høyland, H̊avard Strand, Olav Schram Stokke, Andreas Hvidsten, Silje Lyder

Hermannsen, Vibeke Wøien Hansen, Tatjana Stankovic, Kacper Szulecki, Nils Weidmann,

Hanne Fjelde, Nynke Salverda, Henning Finseraas, Cristina Bucur, Helge Holtermann,

Sabine Otto, Espen Geelmuyden Rød, Magnus Rasmussen, Nina Von Uexkull, Kristian

Gleditsch, Kristin Bakke, Svend Erik Skaaning, Agnes Cornell, Jørgen Møller, Merethe

Bech Seeberg, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fenja Søndergaard Møller, Jacob Tolstrup, and

Lasse Lykke Rørbæk for commenting on one or more of the different articles comprising

this thesis on various occasions. I would especially like to thank my good friends Emil

Aas Stoltenberg, Magnus Rasmussen, Øyvind Skorge and Sirianne Dahlum for reading

and providing detailed comments on parts of this manuscript at different stages.

I would never have survived 10 years at UiO without intellectual companions and close

friends. In this respect, I want to thank my great political science classmates; Aksel, Emil,

Per Anders, Anders J., Øyvind, Magnus, Lars Petter, Ørjan, Alf, and Rune. Although

we are no longer formally students, we will never stop studying together. The same goes

for fellow Blindern-travelers and close childhood friends, André Anundsen and Anders

Solli Sal, who got bitten by the academia bug together with me when we started at the

University (and are still affected). I would also like to thank all of my close friends from

Grenland who have stuck with me and kept it real from high-school through university.

You know who you are.

Importantly, I want to thank my closest family; St̊ale (brother), Grethe (mom), and

Bjarne (dad), who have all encouraged me and supported me in all of my pursuits. None

of this would have been possible without you! Finally, I owe a debt to my harshest critic,

fellow researcher, closest friend, biggest fan (?), traveling buddy, and girlfriend, Sirianne,

4

who is more important to this project and me than I can do justice to in these pages.

Working on this thesis would have been lonely without you.

5

1 Institutions and Civil Peace in Weak States

1.1 Introduction

Somewhere close to a million people have been killed in internal armed conflicts worldwide

since the end of the cold war (Petterson, 2014a). The indirect costs are equally severe,

as internal conflicts have large detrimental effects on human development (Gates et al.,

2012).1 Even if organized violence has been decreasing worldwide (Pinker, 2011), it is

still one of the greatest global threats to human well-being.

One often proposed cure to this global burden is the development of political institu-

tions that promote peace through accountability and good governance. According to this

argument, currently conflict-prone countries such as Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan,

could lower their risk of civil war if they became sufficiently well governed and demo-

cratic, thereby entering a “civil peace” induced by pacifying national institutions (Hegre

and Nyg̊ard, 2014; Hegre et al., 2001; Walter, 2014). This dissertation shows that this

institutional civil-peace argument needs updating. The argument is partly right in that

political institutions matter for conflict. However, in many of the world’s most conflict-

prone developing nations, state institutions have a limited geographical and substantive

reach, making their descriptive features unrepresentative of institutions on the ground.

The situation in many conflict-ridden countries is akin to that described by a senior gov-

ernment official in the Central African Republic, remarking that “the State stops at PK

12, twelve kilometers from the capital, Bangui” (Herbst, 2000, 139).

I will show that the current focus on national institutions as solutions to the problem

of armed conflict misses much of the subnational institutional variation that matters.

In the following chapters, I demonstrate that the quality, accountability, strengths, and

capacities of subnational institutions contribute significantly to civil peace, drawing on

evidence from Africa. Consequently, I propose that in neglecting the subnational level, the

1A country suffering from a medium-sized conflict, causing around 2500 battle deaths, is estimated toexperience an increase in infant mortality rate of 10%, and a 3.3% reduction in average life expectancyas a result (Gates et al., 2012).

state-centric orientation of the institutional civil-peace argument overlooks the political

institutions most central to peace in the developing world.

A state of civil peace is a situation where societal actors with conflict potential reach

non-violent bargained solutions to differing interests rather than engage in fighting. The

thesis highlights how two kinds of subnational political institutions contribute to such

a state. One part of the thesis considers the customary institutions that often organize

ethnic groups in Africa. A second part studies the role of formal local government insti-

tutions, like municipalities, regional governments, and local bureaucracies. Formal local

government institutions are the local representatives of the modern state, while custom-

ary institutions (often) are the contemporary remnants of pre-colonial states and empires.

The main claim of the thesis is that the quality and strength of these two kinds of subna-

tional institutions contribute significantly to local civil peace in Africa. Building on this,

I argue that subnational institutions should matter more in weak-state contexts such as

in Africa where state institutions often have a poor reach (Herbst, 2000). To investigate

these claims, I utilize two datasets on customary institutions compiled from ethnographic

data and expert surveys, and two datasets using georeferenced survey data to measure the

quality of formal local government institutions. These datasets have never before been

used to study internal conflict. Consequently, I present one of the first comprehensive

and systematic attempts to study subnational customary and formal local government

institutions in relation to internal conflict.

Each part of the thesis provides an independent supporting argument for the general

claim that subnational institutions contribute to civil peace, and that these are particu-

larly important in states with weak institutions such as in most African countries. First, I

demonstrate the limits of the institutional civil peace argument when it comes to predict-

ing civil conflict at the national level. This happens in Chapter 2, where I present a novel

take on empirically evaluating the links between national political institutions and civil

peace. The chapter investigates whether liberal institutional attributes like democracy,

quality of government and rule of law, are able to predict civil conflict out of sample. Cru-

cially, I examine which countries the institutional-civil-peace model can predict well and

which countries it has trouble with. This analysis shows that the democracy-autocracy

dimension and institutional-quality aspects perform particularly poorly when it comes to

predicting conflict in states with weakly consolidated institutions. In doing so, I outline

some of the limitations of the national-level approach to the institutions-conflict link,

making the case that this might reflect the low saliency of national institutions in de-

veloping countries with weakly consolidated national institutions. This chapter sets the

stage for the subsequent chapters, motivating a more detailed exploration of the role of

subnational institutions in weak states.

The rest of the thesis takes up this challenge. Chapters 3-4 investigate the role of cus-

tomary institutions in African conflicts, making the claim that historically centralized and

highly institutionalized customary institutions reduce conflict by facilitating bargaining

between ethnic groups. Chapter 3 focuses on the historical institutions of ethnic groups,

demonstrating that groups with historically centralized customary institutions are less

8

prone to ethnic civil wars. Chapter 4 uses contemporary data on the customary insti-

tutions of ethnic groups to show how the presence of formalized customary institutions

at the local level, like customary courts, houses of chiefs and legislative councils, reduces

the involvement of ethnic groups in communal conflicts.

Although this part of the thesis presents robust evidence that customary institutions

shape the conditions for ethnic conflict, these customary institutions exist alongside for-

mal local government institutions whose quality and organization also matter for civil

peace in Africa. This brings us to chapters 5-6, which exclusively look at the role of

formal local government institutions in African conflicts. Chapter 5 investigates the rela-

tionship between subnational institutional quality and local conflict violence, presenting

evidence for a “local civil peace” whereby administrative districts with high-quality local

institutions are less prone to conflict. In this context, a clear threat to inferences attribut-

ing a causal effect of institutions is the possibility of reverse causality, which would be

the case if conflict affected institutional development. Chapter 6 investigates the impor-

tance of this reverse-causality threat as it relates to formal local government institutions

and conflict. This chapter demonstrates that the effects of conflict on local institutional

development are less grave than expected. While exposure to local conflict violence has

marginal effects on citizens’ trust in institutions, it does not have any detrimental effects

on more objective institutional parameters like experiences with local corruption. This

suggests that the root causes of local institutional quality are much deeper than what can

be explained by contemporary conflict levels. Together, Chapters 2-6 form a unified pic-

ture supporting the contention that the quality and strength of subnational institutions,

both customary and formal, matter for creating civil peace at the local level in Africa,

and perhaps even more so than national-level institutions.

The bulk of the chapters (3 through 6) study conflict in Africa. This is partly due to

data availability. The African continent is where the subnational institutional variety of

the kind mentioned above is arguably the most prevalent. It is also where we find most of

the available sources for constructing datasets to capture this variety. Furthermore, the

African continent represents a cluster of countries with weakly consolidated institutions

with a short geographical reach (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2014; Herbst, 2000),

where the subnational variation in institutions should be expected to matter more. In

states recovering from colonization where state-building has not yet led to institutional

consolidation is where we would expect to find a) a myriad of surviving political entities

with their own institutions existing alongside central governments, and b) the largest

subnational variation in attributes of local government institutions.

This contrasts with regions such as Europe and North America, where the process of

state building has taken its course. In such settings, the attributes of nation-states should

play a larger role in conflict reduction than in weakly consolidated states. For example,

we would not expect the successors to historical polities with roots prior to the formation

of modern states to matter for (the absence of) civil conflict in Europe today. While pre-

state institutions, like the various kingdoms populating the Holy Roman Empire until its

dissolution in 1806, played a large role in European conflicts prior to the rise of territorial

9

states (Spruyt, 1996), they are no longer as consequential. However, in parts of the world

where the state-building process is more recent, mainly due to the crippling impacts of

colonialism, remnants of pre-colonial institutions are still present and play a role in civil

conflict. Hence, studying subnational institutions in Africa is necessary, both to assess

the institutional causes of peace in these countries, and because these are the only settings

in which we will observe this degree of subnational institutional variation in institutions.

This makes Africa a crucial case for the argument proposed in this thesis.

Several policy implications flow from the findings and arguments presented below.

Primarily, in contrast to many arguments made in the institutions-conflict literature (e.g.,

Walter, 2014; Hegre and Nyg̊ard, 2014; Hegre et al., 2001), the studies indicate that simply

trying to “fix” national institutions, for example by improving the quality of national

governance, or introducing free and fair elections, might not be the best institutional

cure for civil conflict in places where national institutions are weakly consolidated and

subnational institutions might matter more. In contrast to much literature highlighting

the negative role played by local authorities in African politics (Mamdani, 1996), and to

those highlighting that rule by customary rulers could increase conflict risk (Eck, 2014),

this thesis emphasizes that these institutions are central to sustaining local civil peace

in Africa. Consequently, a state-building process that undermines local authorities, like

local customary institutions, might be dangerous precisely because it removes some of

the institutional frameworks that contribute to local civil peace.

1.1.1 Crucial definitions

In section 1.3, I discuss the conceptual framework of the thesis in detail. However, I

provide some brief definitions of key concepts here, to make the subsequent discussions

more precise. First, by institutions, I mean “the patterns of interactions that govern and

constrain the relationships of individuals” (North, Wallis and Weingast, 2009, 15), with

emphasis on the formal and informal rules governing political interactions.

Second, in defining customary institutions, I emphasize that these are institutional

structures that organize ethnic groups. These structures often descend from, and are

similar to, pre-colonial political systems, whose “legitimacy is rooted in history – either

real or invented – and culture” Ubink (2008a, 8). Hence, customary institutions are

founded on traditional authority with reference to an established past. Furthermore,

what distinguishes customary institutions from other traditional institutions, such as

for example the Catholic church, is that they are institutions that function as political

systems for the ethnic groups organized in these institutions, where a political system is

conceived as “any persistent pattern of human relationship that involves, to a significant

extent power, rule or authority” (Dahl, 1964, 6).

I also focus on formal local government institutions, that are here defined as public

and formal political institutions representing the modern state at the local level. These

will typically be the institutions governing formal administrative units below the nation

state, such as municipalities, regional governments and city councils. Local government

10

institutions are the local manifestations of the institutions of the modern state, while cus-

tomary institutions commonly have independent pre-colonial roots. I shall therefore treat

local government institutions and customary institutions as separate, while recognizing

that they often will matter for the same constituents. However, it is important to note

that the lines between customary authorities and formal local government institutions

are often quite fluid. In many parts of Africa, as will be discussed below, the power that

is commonly vested in local formal government institutions is delegated to traditional

rulers. Moreover, customary leaders will in many cases blend in with formal government

authorities, for example when customary chiefs are also elected councilors in local formal

government institutions.

Finally, the outcomes studied below all sort under the general heading of internal

armed conflict. I will here loosely follow the standard UCDP-PRIO definition (Gleditsch

et al., 2002), and define internal armed conflict very broadly, as a militarized violent

confrontation between two organized actors fighting over some contested incompatibil-

ity. Although I focus on different manifestations of civil conflict throughout the thesis,

from classic instances of rebel vs. government civil war, to non-state communal conflicts

between ethnic groups, these distinctions between conflict types are not of fundamental

importance to the arguments in the thesis (for further discussion, see section 1.5).

The structure of this chapter is as follows. In the next section (1.2), I place my

contribution in the broader literature and make the case for the subnational approach

advocated throughout the thesis. I will here argue for the special role of subnational

institutions in weak states, discuss the African case in light of this, and present two case

examples that illustrate the main arguments. Section 1.3 presents the conceptual frame-

work of the thesis, discussing institutions, their attributes, and other concepts relevant

to the thesis in greater detail. Section 1.4 presents the explanatory framework of the

thesis, outlining the role that subnational institutions can play in reducing the risk of

conflict. Section 1.5 discusses my approach to measuring subnational institutions and

conflict. In section 1.6, I discuss how we can draw inferences regarding the pacifying role

of subnational institutions, with a focus on the philosophical approach to explanation and

inference taken in the thesis, as well as the general methodological approach advocated.

Finally, I present the structure of the thesis, in section 1.7, before discussing implications

and policy recommendations in section 1.8.

1.2 The institutional causes of conflict: The case for

a subnational approach

The questions asked in this thesis tie into a larger debate concerning which political in-

stitutional structures are conducive to internal peace. This debate has deep historical

roots. In Politics, Aristotle mused over the causes of revolution under different forms

of government, suggesting that both Oligarchies, Democracies, Aristocracies and Tyran-

nies were likely to experience internal upheavals whenever a mismatch arose between the

11

distribution of political power and the distribution of economic power (Aristotle, 2000).2

The institutional cure for conflict is also a prominent question in post-classical political

theory. Thomas Hobbes (in)famously proposed a strongly centralized Leviathan as a so-

lution to the problem of internal violence (Hobbes, 1651/1968), while Locke prescribed

a more limited form of constitutional rule (Locke, 1689/1988). These debates have con-

tinued in contemporary political science, where the aim is to evaluate the institutional

causes of internal conflict using the methods and toolbox of modern science.

As in Aristotle’s theory of revolution, the primary focus in the contemporary literature

on institutions and conflict has been on regime type, and how different forms of government

affect the risk of civil war. An important strand of this discussion revolves around whether

democracy pacifies. Some arguments imply that more inclusive political regimes should

be less prone to conflict than others, for example through creating political legitimacy

that reduces popular grievances (Gurr, 1970), or by providing institutional guarantees

for the redistribution of wealth (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006). These views suggest

a monotonic relationship between democracy and civil war, whereby higher levels of

democracy yield less conflict.

The most popular take on the democracy-civil conflict relationship, however, is the so

called “inverted-u curve” expectation. This proposes that regimes that are “inconsistently

democratic”, like present-day Nigeria, which combines competitive elections and substan-

tial restrictions on both civil liberties and political rights (see e.g., Freedom House, 2015),

are most likely to experience civil war. Meanwhile, consolidated democracies, like Den-

mark, and consolidated autocracies, like Saudi Arabia, should experience fewer internal

conflicts (Hegre et al., 2001; Muller and Weede, 1990). What gives rise to this expecta-

tion is the notion that harshly authoritarian regimes should have the ability to repress

potential dissidents enough to prevent an uprising, while consolidated democracies should

allow opposition groups to peacefully voice and negotiate demands through democratic

channels. In short, violence is too costly in the autocratic end of the spectrum, while

non-violent opposition is cheap and effective in the democratic end. Although the ini-

tial evidence for the inverted-u association was strong (Hegre et al., 2001), it has been

criticized for hinging on biases in the democracy measure used (Vreeland, 2008), and

insufficient attention to measurement error (Treier and Jackman, 2008).3 However, the

association remains in analyses where the criticism of coding bias is accounted for (e.g.,

Gleditsch, Hegre and Strand, 2009; Regan and Bell, 2010).

While arguments concerning the inverted-u curve are mostly about how levels of

democracy relate to conflict, some argue that democratic transitions are dangerous. Some

attribute this to the sudden increase in political participation in settings where institu-

tional prerequisites for peaceful political competition – like the rule of law or an impartial

bureaucracy – are lacking (Huntington, 1968; Linz and Stepan, 1996). Others argue that

2For a precise statement of this interpretation of Aristotle‘s theory of revolution, see Kort (1952).3Another important caveat to the u-curve is presented in Gleditsch and Ruggeri (2010), who find that

once controlling for opportunity structures – proxied by recent irregular leader removal – the monotonicrelationship between democracy and civil conflict reappears.

12

democratization is conflict-inducing because of commitment problems and strategic un-

certainty (Przeworski, 1991; Kalyvas, 2000), while many highlight that transition periods

are particularly vulnerable to ethnic-mobilization dynamics that lead to ethnic conflict

(Snyder, 2000; Mansfield and Snyder, 2005).

A significant number of contributions have looked at other institutional aspects than

democracy. Some studies have focused on the presence of “consociational” power-sharing

institutions that protect ethnic minorities (e.g., Hartzell and Hoddie, 2007; Gates et al.,

2013), primarily building on the work of Lijphart (1999, 1977, 1969). More recent studies

have emphasized aspects related to quality of government, like a well-functioning bu-

reaucracy and the rule of law (Hegre and Nyg̊ard, 2014; Fearon, 2011; Taydas, Peksen

and James, 2010; Walter, 2014). Scholars focusing on quality of government argue that it

reduces conflict-inducing grievances (Hegre and Nyg̊ard, 2014), and diminishes opportuni-

ties for conflict through improving state capacity (e.g., Taydas, Peksen and James, 2010).

It has also been hypothesized that quality of government matters by solving bargaining

problems (Walter, 2014).

The broad strokes of this literature reveals the contours of what I call an institutional

civil-peace argument, where states that are consistently democratic and well-governed

should be the least prone to conflict. This argument is commonly supported by either

of three general “meta-theories” concerning how institutions cause conflict, that each ap-

pear in the works surveyed above. Although these will be discussed further in section

1.4 below, they deserve brief mention here. One perspective emphasizes that political

institutions can cause conflict in so far as they create political grievances and feelings of

injustice that motivate rebellion (Gurr, 1970; Cederman, Gleditsch and Buhaug, 2013).

The “opportunity” perspective claims that institutions should cause violence if they en-

gender opportunities for rebel activity (Fearon and Laitin, 2003), exemplified by most of

the arguments for the“inverse u-curve”(e.g., Hegre et al., 2001). Finally, others emphasize

that institutions are devices for solving commitment problems, highlighting that institu-

tions that enshrine power sharing (Walter, 2002), high quality of government (Walter,

2014), or democracy (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006) will allow actors to more credibly

distribute gains and losses in ways that would avoid war.

Although the studies and arguments surveyed here represent very important contribu-

tions to the study of which institutional arrangements increase the risk of internal conflict,

the field seems to have reached a plateau from which progress appears to be much slower.4

In spite of the high explanatory power of the argument that inclusive political institu-

tions and quality of government promotes peace, several key questions are insufficiently

explored. First, and importantly for this thesis, we do not know whether the statistical

associations identified, for example the inverse u-curve association, are general and robust

relationships that allow us to predict conflict in diverse settings. If the institutional civil

peace thesis is a robust general explanation for civil conflict, it should allow us to pre-

4The studies mentioned use many of the same data sets, and many of the investigations resemble eachother. Hence, there is only so much more we can learn from the next cross-country time-series study ofcivil conflict, using the same measures of institutional characteristics like regime-type and power sharing.

13

dict civil conflict across a range of spatio-temporal contexts, and, crucially, it should be

able to predict “unseen” cases that have not been used for establishing the relationships

asserted by the theory.5 Furthermore, we do not know whether the institutional argu-

ments for conflict can “travel” to incorporate other institutions than those at the national

level. For example, whether these arguments yield implications that are validated at the

subnational level. Finally, the possibility that the effects of national institutions might

be conditional on the reach of these national institutions, which is suggested in studies

of economic growth (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2014), is rarely entertained.

These considerations hint at a more fundamental gap in the literature on political

institutions and civil peace, and an unexplored alternative to the institutional civil peace

argument. Namely, that too little attention has been devoted to other institutions than

national ones in contexts where national institutions are weak and unrepresentative of

the institutional variation on the ground in developing countries. I will now go on to

develop this argument, making the case for a novel civil-peace research agenda focusing on

subnational institutions in weak states. In doing so, I will present Africa as a particularly

suited case for the implementation of such a project.

1.2.1 Subnational institutions in weak states: Beyond method-

ological statism

While many research areas in conflict research have moved towards disaggregation from

the national to the subnational level (for an overview, see Gleditsch, Metternich and Rug-

geri, 2014), the brand of conflict research looking at the effects of political institutions has

not.6 It is still almost exclusively focused on the institutions of nation-states. There are

several reasons why this focus should be reoriented towards investigating the institutional

causes of peace at the subnational level.

First, there are examples from related sub-fields within conflict research indicating

the potential benefits of disaggregation. Disaggregating to subnational units has yielded

significant returns, for example in investigations of the economic correlates of civil conflicts

(e.g., Buhaug et al., 2011; Hegre, Østby and Raleigh, 2009).7 This is due to a realization

of the dictum that “all politics is local” (Rustad et al., 2011). Indeed, civil war, like many

other phenomena has origins and dynamics that are essentially local in origin (Rustad

et al., 2011). For example, even if national GDP per capita indicates a low risk of conflict,

a country might have particularly poor regions whose income levels dispose for conflict

in contrast to the national average (e.g., Buhaug et al., 2011). Furthermore, it might

be precisely those groups residing in regions that are richer or poorer than the country

5There is some indication that the democracy-autocracy dimension predicts relatively poorly out ofsample (Ward, Greenhill and Bakke, 2010), which might suggest that it describes a specific group ofcountries and not others.

6See also the special issue of Journal of Conflict Resolution on“Disaggregating Civil War”’ (Cedermanand Gleditsch, 2009).

7This has partly been a response to the very large number of studies having investigated this associ-ation at the national level (Collier and Hoeffler, 2004; Miguel, Satyanath and Serengeti, 2004)

14

average that will resort to violence (Cederman, Weidmann and Gleditsch, 2011). In these

cases, exclusively looking at national GDP increases the threat of ecological fallacies.

In light of this, disaggregation has resulted in much firmer conclusions regarding, for

example, the relationship between poverty and conflict (e.g., Buhaug et al., 2011).

Given that subnational disaggregation has been a largely successful endeavor, why

has it not taken place in the study of the institutions-conflict link, and why does this

matter?8 First, one obvious answer is that many institutions by definition only exist at

national levels. It makes little sense, for example, to investigate the effects of democratic

regime-type on the risk of civil war onset using subnational administrative districts as

units of analyses. This is because democratic regime types by definition exist at the

national level.9 A second reason is a lack of data describing subnational institutional

variation.

In spite of these caveats, there are several reasons why disaggregation should nev-

ertheless be pursued in studies of political institutions and conflict. The main reason

highlighted here is substantive. Disaggregation it allows us to study the role of subna-

tional institutions in the contexts where attributes of national institutions might matter

less for conflict. There are several reasons why we should expect this to be the case. In

states with weakly consolidated national institutions, attributes of these institutions will

not describe areas where national level institutions have no reach. In Africa, coloniz-

ers primarily focused on ruling their capitals, commonly located at the coast, governing

through local customary authorities in the periphery (Mamdani, 1996). As emphasized

by Africa scholars, this lack of centralization has persisted, partly due to the colonial

heritage, but also due to geographies that make political centralization difficult (Herbst,

2000; Mamdani, 1996). Recent large-n studies support the contention that national insti-

tutions in Africa have a short reach. In a recent study, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou

(2014) use satellite night-time light density as a proxy for local economic growth, find-

ing that the effect of national institutional quality on regional development decays with

distance from the capital. They find that for approximately 60% of their sample (of

ethnic-group homelands), features of national institutions, measured by several World

Governance Indicators (Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi, 2009), essentially have no ef-

fect on local economic development. This is evidence suggesting the poor reach of national

institutions in Africa. The statement by the bureaucrat in CAR (quoted above), that ”the

State stops at PK 12”, might apply to more countries than the Central African Republic.

If national institutions have a poor reach in weak states, like those found in Africa,

we must move beyond studying how national institutional attributes shape conflict risk.

8An exception is the emerging literature looking at the institutional consequences of conflict (e.g.,Bellows and Miguel, 2009; Voors and Bulte, 2014; Gilligan, Pasquale and Samii, 2014; Voors et al.,2012), which will be the subject of chapter 6. These studies are not extensively reviewed here, since theyare not about how institutions condition conflict, but the reverse causal relationship.

9Although one could investigate the more abstract question of whether inclusive political structures ingeneral breed less violence by looking at subnational variations in the inclusiveness of local government,the fact that many political institutions, in certain respects, only exist (by definition) at the nationallevel has probably halted disaggregation in this part of the literature.

15

Crucially, we must understand the role of local institutions. But what kind of local

institutions? In the following, I discuss local-level institutional variation in Africa as a

particularly illustrative example of the relationship between a weak state consolidation

and subnational institutions.

Variations in subnational institutions: The case of Africa

One dimension of subnational institutional variation that this thesis considers is the

customary institutions of ethnic groups, descending from pre-colonial political systems.

During colonialism, African states were constructed on top of a plethora of pre-existing

polities, a majority of which have survived in various forms up until the present day.

pre-colonial kingdoms like the Zulu kingdom, Ashanti empire or the state of Buganda

are notable examples. Unlike European nations, which have grown endogenously, and

whose borders have been chiseled out by millennia of warfare and migration (Kitamura

and Lagerlöf, 2015), most contemporary African states are modern constructs, layered

on top of “preexisting political institutions, underlying norms of political behavior, and

customary sources of political authority” (Englebert, 2000, 5).

These pre-colonial political systems, described as customary or pre-colonial institu-

tions in this thesis, have been shown to play a significant role in contemporary African

politics. Some highlight their detrimental effects. Eck (2014) argues that customary

political systems within states create competing legal jurisdictions that increase the risk

of communal conflicts. Furthermore, Englebert (2000) argues that the existence of pre-

colonial states within artificially constructed borders have caused a legitimacy deficit for

national institutions, resulting in poor institutional quality and low economic develop-

ment. In this account, poor state capacity in Africa is partly endogenous to the existence

of pre-colonial political structures within artificially constructed borders.

Regardless of the role of pre-colonial polities in creating state weakness, the fact that

African national institutions are exceptionally weak (see e.g., Herbst, 2000) has allowed

these customary political systems to play a major role as institutional structures beneath

the state (see also Migdal, 1988). Accordingly, much recent work has documented the

significant impact that pre-colonial states have on contemporary economic growth in their

traditional homelands (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2015, 2013, 2014). Others have

highlighted the role of customary chiefs in local public goods provision (Baldwin, 2013),

and their role as arbiters in resource- and land management (Boone, 2003, 2014). The

resilience of these institutions is attested by the significant degree of popular support that

they still enjoy (Logan, 2013).

A representation of the variety in pre-colonial polities in Africa can be found in fig-

ure 1.1 which shows the ethnographic map of Murdock (1967) – discussed at length in

Chapter 3 – where each polygon represents a pre-colonial polity, as these are described

in the comparative ethnographic data collected by Murdock (1967). This map, although

arguably subject to some measurement error (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2015),

shows the immense variety in pre-colonial polities existing before the creation of modern

16

African states. Many of these polities have survived in the form of customary authorities

at the local level. Visible manifestations of the persistence of customary political systems

can be found in the traditional legislatures, courts, kings and houses of chiefs that mark

the institutional landscape in Africa. This thesis highlights the importance of studying

the role of these customary institutions in civil conflicts, which will be the subject of

chapters 3 and 4.

Figure 1.1: Murdock’s ethnographic map of pre-colonial polities in Africa

Another source of subnational variation in Africa is the variation in formal local

government institutions. As is frequently noted (e.g., Rustad et al., 2011), conflicts in

the developing world are often distinctly local phenomena, that haunt particular regions

rather than entire countries. Northern Nigeria, northern Uganda, or the Kivu region in the

DRC, are all contemporary examples of regions that are significantly more conflict prone

than the countries they are part of, hosting the Boko Haram, Lord‘s Resistance Army,

and the M23 insurgencies respectively. There is also significant subnational variation

in attributes, and particularly in the quality, of formal local government institutions in

Africa.

An illustrative example of this pattern can be seen in the Afrobarometer surveys (Afro-

barometer, 2008). Chapter 4 maps survey responses in the Afrobarometer to administra-

tive districts, using aggregate responses (at the district level) as proxies for institutional

17

Table 1.1: Survey items capturing perceptions of local institutional quality from theAfrobarometer survey (round 4)

Survey question R2 attributed tocountry-specific effects (Afrobarometer round 4)

Experienced corruption .23Police corrupt .51Local authorities corrupt .43Trust police .37Trust local authorities .38Trust courts .39

The items used will be described in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5, as well as in the appendices tothese chapters.

quality. Using these data, table 1.1 (below) considers responses tapping institutional

quality from this dataset, using items from round 4 of the Afrobarometer survey. The

table shows how much of the variance in survey items (tapping institutional quality) that

is accounted for by country level factors (a set of country dummies). The items register

experiences with corruption, perceptions of corruption among the police and other local

authorities, trust in police and other local authorities, and trust in courts. Table 1.1

displays the R2 yielded by country dummies when modeling these items. We see that

that even if national-level factors explain a substantial amount, the highest R2 being .51,

country-level factors commonly account for less than half of the district-level variation in

perceived and experienced institutional quality. This indicates the importance of looking

at variation in subnational institutions in Africa.

Drawing inference based on African cases

As noted, there are substantive reasons for investigating subnational institutions in the

context of weak states, and Africa is the best candidate for doing this. However, there are

several external validity issues related to generalizing from such a study. First, a clear

limitation is that Africa-based inferences might only be valid for contexts where there

are weak national-level institutions, or, in the worst case, only for Africa. It should be

explicitly noted that I do not expect subnational institutions to matter as much in fully

consolidated states, such as those found in most OECD countries.

A more subtle concern is that studying these institutions in weak states can be seen as

selection on the dependent variable. After all, state weakness and lack of state building

is probably both an outcome and a cause of conflict, meaning that the subnational level

is partly relevant because of factors that yield a high risk of conflict. In other words, the

very fact that these institutions matter is because these societies are particularly conflict

prone.

Nevertheless, I believe there are important theoretical lessons to be learned from

disaggregation. Even if many of the findings are not directly translatable to other contexts

18

than the weak-state situation studied, or perhaps not even translatable to contexts outside

of Africa, the studies presented below yield many general insights that are of theoretical

significance, and that, importantly, add to the general empirical content of the theories

applied. For example, Chapter 5 investigates implications of general theories relating

to how institutional quality should promote civil peace – commonly tested on country-

year data (e.g., Hegre and Nyg̊ard, 2014) – on subnational data. Since the arguments

relating institutional quality to civil peace at the country level also imply that local

institutional quality should reduce the prevalence of local conflict (see Chapter 5 for a

survey), investigating this proposition yields an additional piece of evidence in favor of

those theories.

Another example can be found in chapters 3 and 4, where I draw on bargaining theory

(Fearon, 1995) to generate many of the expectations. In these cases, empirical support

for these hypotheses add to the empirical support for bargaining theory more generally.

Moreover, in Chapter 4 I explicitly set out to test general institutional explanations for

war developed for intra- and inter-state conflicts, on the customary institutions of ethnic

groups in Africa and their involvement in communal conflicts. In this case, the specific

inferences relating to the customary institutions of ethnic groups have low external valid-

ity because of the peculiarities of African customary institutions. However, the findings

add to the strength of the overarching theories tested, since the fact that implications of a

general theory hold in a novel context yields additional empirical support. The fact that

most theories applied in this thesis is developed in other contexts, like theories relating

to institutions and international conflict, adds to the strength of the general theoretical

inferences drawn from each study.10

To recap, I maintain that conflict researchers interested in how institutions shape

conflict outcomes in weak states need to study subnational institutions. Before discussing

the conceptual, empirical and methodological tools I will use to put this appeal into action,

I briefly discuss two concrete cases that illustrate the arguments made in the thesis.11

1.2.2 Customary institutions: Ashanti in Ghana

One example of a pre-colonial polity that has persevered into modern times is the Ashanti

kingdom in Ghana. Prior to colonization Ashanti had developed into an empire, with

a centralized government, a judiciary, a bureaucracy, police force and diplomatic corps

(Edgerton, 2010). Indeed, Ashanti resembled many of the young European states of

the eighteenth and nineteenth century (Morisson, 1983, 450). Many of the structures of

10One of the virtues of testing social scientific theories is to maximize the number of implications ofthe theory under investigation, and to test as many of these implications as possible (King, Keohaneand Verba, 1994, 24,30). If a theory can predict and test entirely novel implications, then this adds tothe truth-content of the theory (for a general statement of this view, see Lakatos, 1980). This points toanother benefit to disaggregation, namely that it presents us with a promising arena for testing additionalimplications from theories previously tested on country-level data. Several parts of the thesis show thisphilosophy in action.

11These cases are included for illustrative purposes, and should not be understood as case studies intheir own right.

19

the Ashanti kingdom have survived. After initially having resisted British colonization

Ashanti became a protectorate of Britain in 1896, and was subsequently incorporated

as a quasi-sovereign state in a state union with Ghana after independence. Although

the Ashanti kingdom has lost many of its formal and de-facto powers in relation to the

Ghanaian state, its key institutions, such as the kingdom, the institution of chieftaincy

and its traditional house of chiefs, all persist and play important roles in local politics in

Ashantiland. For example, traditional Ashanti authorities are instrumental in land man-

agement, conflict mediation, and the adjudication of general disputes and land claims

(e.g., Boone, 2014, 2003; Ubink, 2008b,c; Owusu-Mensah, 2014). In this thesis, I inves-

tigate three expectations regarding traditional institutions and their relation to ethnic

conflict. I will now proceed to illustrate each of them by applying them to the Ashanti

case.

Figure 1.2: Ghana (red border) and contemporary Ashantiland (green border)

ABE ADANGME

ADELE

AJUKRU

AKPOSO

AKYEM

ANA

ANYI

ARI

ASHANTI

ASSINI

ATTIE

ATYUTI

AVATIME

AVIKAMBAKWE

BARGU

BASARI BASILA

BAULE

BETE

BIRIFON

BOBO

BRONG

BUEM

BUILSA BUSA

BUSANSI

CHAKOSSI

DAGARI

DAGOMBA

DENDI

DIAN

DIDA

DIULA

DOROSIE

EBRIE

EGBA

EWE

FANTI

FON

GA

GAGU

GAN

GREBO

GRUNSHI

GUANG

GUIN

GUN

GURENSI

GURMA

GURO IFE

IJEBU

KABRE

KARABORO

KEBU

KILINGAKOMONO KONKOMBA

KRACHI

KULANGOLIGBI, DEGHA (SE)

LILSE

LOBI

MAMPRUSI

MEKYIBO

MINIANKA

MOBA

NAFANA

NAUDEBA

NUNUMA

POPO

RESHE

SENUFO

SIA

SOMBA

TEM

TIENGA

TRIBU

TUSYAN

VAGALA

WABA

WARA

WOBE

YORUBA

First, I argue that customary authorities with a tradition of political centralization,

such as Ashanti, are less likely to experience conflicts with central governments because

they have been able to rely on their historically centralized institutions to reach credible

non-violent bargains with the state (Chapter 3). Although one can not observe a “dog

that did not bark”, meaning a counterfactual conflict that occurred in the absence of

Ashanti institutions, we can observe successful bargaining between Ashanti leaders and

the central Ghanean government, as well as the absence of major conflict between the

two.

20

For example, under British colonial administration the Ashanti were given formal

authority over many aspects of land management, a deal described as “the linchpin of

British indirect rule in Ghana” (Boone, 2014, 215). This endowed power-sharing sta-

tus continued after the end of British rule. For example, the first Chieftaincy act of

1961 assigned a privileged status to Ashanti chiefs, which occurred in spite of president

Kwameh Nkrumah‘s attempts to undermine traditional leaders in Ashantiland (Boone,

2003, 159-163).12 The powers of Ashanti chiefs were further expanded and codified in the

constitution of 1969, the chieftaincy act of 1971, the constitution of 1992 and the recent

chieftaincy act of 2008.

These examples illustrate how successive Ghanean governments have devolved powers

to Ashanti chiefs, mostly concerning land rights (Owusu-Mensah, 2014). A key reason

was that they were seen as credible partners that could command loyalty from the popu-

lations that identified with them (e.g., Boone, 2003). Furthermore, although there have

been many incompatibilities between Ashanti leaders and the Ghanean government, for

example over the control of cocoa production (Boone, 2003, 159-174), there has been no

organized military conflict between the Ashanti ethnic group and Ghana to date.

In Chapter 4, I argue that formal customary institutions, like customary courts and

legislatures, can reduce the likelihood of inter- or intra-group conflict between or within

ethnic groups. I argue that this is because these institutions facilitate credible bargaining

and conflict mediation, between tribes belonging to the same ethnic group, and with out-

side groups. This mechanism is also evident in the case of Ashanti. In a description of the

role of Ashanti chiefs in managing conflicts over land, Boone writes that“chiefs are pivotal

in dispute adjudication” (Boone, 2014, 217). Based on survey data on citizen attitudes

to chiefs in the Ashanti region, Ubink (2008b, 152–154) finds that 78% of respondents

noted “dispute resolution” as a main task of traditional chiefs, and 53% listed “ensuring

peace” as a main task. An example of dispute resolution by Ashanti institutions is given

by Alden Wily (2003, 66), who describes how the Ashanti King intervened as a response

to frustration over a huge backlog of land-dispute cases that had yet to be brought in

front of government courts:13

[T]he King of the Ashanti, who was so frustrated with the failure of the

courts to deal with disputes that he ordered his subjects to remove their cases

from courts and have them resolved by his local chiefs or, failing resolution,

bring them to his central Customary Court. By 2000, all but ten cases had

been resolved.

These anecdotes shed some light on the more general patterns investigated in Chapters

3 and 4, illustrating how Ashanti rulers are seen as credible bargaining partners by the

central government, and how their institutions contribute to dispute adjudication and

conflict resolution locally.

12It is important to note that Ashanti chiefs were given much fewer powers under post-colonial gov-ernments, especially Nkrumah‘s, than under British colonial rule (Boone, 2003, 144-174)

13This is also described in Ubink (2008b, 154)

21

1.2.3 Formal local government institutions: The Boko Haram

insurgency in Nigeria

In this thesis, I claim that areas with poor local institutional quality will be more likely to

experience local conflict violence, because low-quality local government generates political

grievances and low state capacity (Chapter 5). Nigeria is one illustrative example, where

reports suggest a relationship between poor local institutional quality and local conflict.

Some regions are notoriously poorly governed, like the Northern states of Nigeria, which

have become the core of the Boko Haram insurgency. Up until, and during, the Boko

Haram insurgency, northern authorities have been plagued by corruption charges. For

example, in 2010, the head Police Commisioner in the northern state of Borno was caught

embezzling over 100 000 dollars in government money (Human Rights Watch, 2010a, 97),

and the region has been continuously plagued by widespread corruption and extrajudicial

killings (Human Rights Watch, 2012). Many analysts have traced the origins of the Boko

Haram insurgency to the corruption and general incompetence that has characterized

local authorities in the northern states. A Nigerian journalist that has interviewed Boko

Haram leaders, is here quoted in a report by Human Rights Watch:

Corruption became the catalyst for Boko Haram. [Mohammed] Yusuf [the

group‘s first leader] would have found it difficult to gain a lot of these people

if he was operating in a functional state. But his teaching was easily accepted

because the environment, the frustrations, the corruption, [and] the injustice

made it fertile for his ideology to grow fast, very fast, like wildfire. (Human

Rights Watch, 2012, 24)

Boko Haram has both capitalized on the weaknesses of the security forces in the north,

and on citizen’s frustrations with poor governance. The group’s promise of security and

uncorrupt administration based on Sharia law has found fertile ground in such a setting.

Meanwhile, other parts of Nigeria, like Lagos, are becoming increasingly well-governed.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Lagos is described as“A model city for the world”, and

much of its recent economic boom is attributed to competitive local elections in which

candidates have increasingly been forced“to show pragmatism and competence”’ (Kaplan,

2014). The point of this comparison is to illustrate how regional variation in institutional

quality might matter for where in a country we will see violent conflict; the state of Borno,

for example, has poor institutions and is highly affected by the insurgency, while Lagos

is comparatively better run and has remained much less touched by the violence.14 A

systemati

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