International Studies Quarterly (2014) 58, 405–417

The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings: The Empirical Record1

Stephan Haggard
University of California, San Diego

and

Lydia Tiede

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University of Houston
This paper analyzes whether and to what extent countries reconstitute the rule of law following civil conflict. Drawing on
an original data set of 47 cases in which conflict ended between 1970 and 1999, we find that the cessation of conflict has
at best a modest effect on the rule of law. On average, countries revert to the pre-conflict rule-of-law status quo ante. In
simple models, rule of law prior to the onset of conflict is the best indicator of post-conflict performance. Analysis of
individual cases using structural break analysis shows that the cessation of conflict is not typically associated with an
inflection in the rule of law; improvements are modest, take a long time, and fall far short of plausible thresholds for
robust rule of law.

When civil wars end, a central objective of all parties—
including outside third parties—is to reconstitute the rule
of law. The task is daunting. Postwar settings are tense:
Conflicts are recent, trust is low, and political settlements
—if they exist—highly fragile. These problems compound
the difficulties of initiating fundamental institutional
change. Fukyama (2010:41) argues that legal systems are
among the most costly to construct because “they have
huge infrastructure needs and require both human and
physical capital.” In addition to these material constraints
are difficult normative questions about the fit between pro-
posed legal reforms and existing social norms and lived
experience. As Fukuyama continues, law needs to “be nor-
matively grounded in the values of the underlying society”
(2010:41); “if the gap between law and lived values is too
large, the rule of law itself will not take hold” (2010:37).
Nonetheless, we might expect some institutional gains
from the end of civil war. At least some diminution in vio-
lence is a necessary if not sufficient condition for robust
rule of law. As Call (2007) notes, post-conflict settings
“provide windows of opportunity for institutional
reforms” (2007:11). The very premise of the extensive
Stephan Haggard is the Krause Distinguished Professor at the Graduate
School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California
San Diego. He works on the comparative political economy of development.
His is the author most recently of Development, Democracy and Welfare States:
Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe (with Robert Kaufman, 2008) and
Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (with Marcus Noland,
2011).
Lydia Tiede is an assistant professor of political science at the University
of Houston. Her research focuses on legal and judicial reforms as well as the
behavior of judges on constitutional courts in a variety of countries. She also
conducts cross national research on the rule of law and its link to economic
development as well as conflict. She is the author, with Stephan Haggard, of
“The Rule of Law and Economic Growth: Where Are We?” World Development
(2011).
1 full-blown theory of this observed outcome. Nor do we
The authors wish to thank the following individuals for valuable com-
ments and input: Jesse Driscoll, Jack Goldstone, Ryan Kennedy, Edmund
Malesky, Barbara Walter.
state-building literature is that outside actors and their
domestic partners can improve governance in the wake
of civil conflict (Hammergren 1998; Carothers 1999;
Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Kang and Meernik 2005;
Stormseth, Wippman and Brooks 2006; Sannerholm
2007; Collier, Hoeffler and S€ oderbom 2008; but see
Enterline and Greig 2005, 2008).
Despite these expectations, recent postwar experiences
are littered with disappointments, from Iraq and Afghani-
stan to Bosnia and El Salvador. To date, however, the
rich array of case studies of success and failure in postwar
reconstruction has not been matched by a systematic
empirical analysis of the rule of law in post-conflict
settings. This paper reviews the empirical record, under-
scores the Sisyphean task of reconstituting—or constitut-
ing—the rule of law, and argues for a corresponding
adjustment of expectations. In contrast to more optimis-
tic studies (Organski and Kugler 1977; Koubi 2005; Cerra
and Saxena 2008; Chen, Loayza and Reynal-Quarol
2008), we find that war termination has a modest effect
on countries’ institutional trajectory, at least in the med-
ium-run.
We draw on an original data set of 47 civil war cases
that includes a wide array of rule-of-law measures. Using
multiple empirical methods—from simple difference-of-
means tests to multivariate regressions and a more sophis-
ticated structural break analysis—we find strong evidence
of path dependence. There is surprisingly little change in
the rule of law following conflicts, and even less if we
compare the pre- and post-conflict periods. Even where
such changes are statistically significant, the improve-
ments are substantively modest. The state of the rule of
law prior to and during the conflict appears to be a pow-
erful—indeed overwhelming—predictor of how a country
performs in the post-conflict period.
It is far beyond the scope of this paper to provide a
seek to exploit cross-national variance in the data to
account for the modest differences between those cases

Haggard, Stephan and Lydia Tiede. (2014) The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings: The Empirical Record. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12103
© 2013 International Studies Association
406 The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings
that fare better and worse in rebuilding the rule of law;
we provide some preliminary findings on this question
but leave it largely to future research. While we do not
provide a theory of path dependence, the finding is con-
sistent both with practical experience in postwar reconsti-
tution and with a wide variety of theory and empirical
research on the long-run nature of fundamental institu-
tional change. Like democratization or the emergence of
growth-promoting economic institutions, the emergence
of the rule of law—which is cognate to these institutions
—is unlikely to change rapidly in national settings that
are prone to civil war in the first place. At best, we can
hope that successful termination of civil war—and
avoiding recidivism—can establish necessary conditions
for subsequent and gradual legal changes to occur.
We proceed in five steps beginning with a discussion of
theoretical issues followed by a description of the data set.
We then outline the results of some simple difference-of-
means tests, distinguishing among pre-conflict, conflict,
and post-conflict periods. We then extend this analysis with
simple regressions that include pre-conflict rule of law,
controlling for GDP per capita and the intensity of conflict.
These controls wash out; they have limited predictive
power when controlling for history, although they may well
have longer-term effects in a more fully specified model
that addresses deeper endogeneity issues. We then conduct
a structural break analysis on each country and rule-of-law
variable, seeing the extent to which the end of civil war
marks an inflection point in a country’s institutional trajec-
tory. Again, null findings dominate. Although the struc-
tural break analysis highlights the variation in the sample
more effectively, summary tables aggregating multiple rule-
of-law measures do not reveal strong improvements in the
rule of law in post-conflict settings. Nor do they identify
the end of conflict as an inflection point in the positive
developments that do occur.
We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the
findings for future research. We report some preliminary
findings on how factors such as third party intervention
and civil war termination might explain observed variance
in the revival of rule of law. But the main point of our
effort is not about variance, but about persistence. Institu-
tional change is difficult, and our expectations about
affecting it in postwar settings should be appropriately
modest. We conclude with a discussion of how these find-
ings, however pessimistic, comport with ongoing policy
debates about intervention and postwar reconstruction.
Theory
Despite the exploding practical interest in the rule of law in
post-conflict settings (Paris 2002, 2004, 2010; United States
Institute of Peace (USIP) 2004; United States Agency for Inter-
national Development (USAID) 2005; Stromseth et al. 2006;
Call 2007), theoretical and empirical work on the topic has
been surprisingly limited (Fearon 2010). Some of the problem
stems from the elusive nature of the very concept itself. The
rule of law implies, perhaps most centrally, governance by rules
as opposed to leaders’ discretion (Madison 1788). But the con-
cept is clearly multidimensional, with a number of interlinked
components (Belton 2005; Haggard, MacIntyre and Tiede
2008; Haggard and Tiede 2011). The rule of law encompasses
effective security of person, property, and contracting rights
and arguably extends to basic civil and political liberties that
guarantee the autonomy and freedom of the individual. How-
ever, such protections ultimately rest not simply on statute but
on the underlying institutional arrangements—the checks and
balances—that limit executive discretion. The principle of
equal treatment and procedural fairness also seem central to
our conception of the rule of law, which is therefore under-
mined by corruption, favoritism, and private capture. In sum,
it makes sense to think about the rule of law—whatever its sub-
stantive content—as encompassing both basic rights and liber-
ties and the complex political and administrative
arrangements that support them.
We would expect civil wars to be associated with an
attenuation of the rule of law through two possible
routes. On the one hand, conflict is likely to generate
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either greater delegation to incumbent executives or the
arrogation of powers by them. These institutional devel-
opments would imply a diminution of checks, for exam-
ple, in declining independence and integrity of the
judiciary, the use of military tribunals, or resort to extra-
judicial processes. Civil conflict is often associated with
declarations of states of emergency, either across the
country or in conflict zones, and attenuation or even sus-
pension of civil and political liberties. We might even
expect property rights to be limited if such changes
would be seen as yielding some security advantage, for
example, in support of a war effort or to confiscate the
assets of the opposition (Berdal and Malone 2000).
On the other hand, the rule of law may break down dur-
ing civil wars as a result of a broader syndrome of state fail-
ure that accompanies some civil wars: circumstances in
which the country experiences a collapse of state authority
altogether (Bates 2008; Goldstone 2008). Rule of law may
break down not because of the abuse of executive power,
but as a result of anarchy: the collapse of central authority.
In the absence of centralized authority, the substantive
rights and freedoms we associate with the rule of law and
the institutions to enforce them evaporate.
In both cases, the end of fighting would seem to con-
stitute a necessary if not sufficient condition for reconsti-
tuting the rule of law. Chen et al. (2008) claim that
virtually all aspects of economic, social, and political
development exhibit gradual improvement following the
end of violent conflict. “Democratic rights are slow to
advance and may require the foundation of long-run
institutions to be consolidated. In contrast the perception
of law and order can be improved rapidly by a variety of
strong government regimes” (Chen et al. 2008:82).
But against these gains stand the constraints outlined
by Fukyama (2010) in the introduction. The rule of law
does not reside in statute. Improving the rule of law is
not a “stroke of the pen” reform, but rather involves the
building of institutions that are intensive in the use of
human and even physical capital. These constraints reso-
nate throughout the practical policy literature on postwar
reconstruction and on rule-of-law programs in particular.
Take, for example, the problem of restoring security in
post-civil war settings and the constraints on security sec-
tor programs (Samuels 2006). First, there is the Catch-22
that the provision of adequate security is a precondition
for other rule-of-law reforms to take root. A painful
lesson learned from experiences in Panama, Bosnia, El
Salvador, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq is the cost of
failing to provide adequate policing functions to deter
residual violence and often escalating criminal behavior.
Providing basic security is only a first step toward address-
ing the complex institutional interdependencies within
security sector programs more narrowly conceived (Samu-
els 2006; Schnabel and Erhart 2006): building a credible
and neutral police force, developing public prosecutors
and defenders, reforming the criminal code, ensuring
 Stephan Haggard and Lydia Tiede
the competence as well as independence of judges, and
guaranteeing the integrity of the penal system. Multiply
this example across the various dimensions of the rule of
law articulated above—property rights, civil and political
liberties, control of corruption, building institutional
checks—and it is easy to see that the end of fighting is
only the first step on a very long road.
These observations comport with an evolving literature
within political science and economics on the sources
and time frame associated with large-scale institutional
change, including on democracy (for example, Przewor-
ski, Alvarez, Cheibub and Limongi 2000) and economic
institutions protective of property rights (Acemoglu and
Johnson 2005). Surprisingly, there has been little work
on the determinants of robust rule of law. But the exam-
ples we have suggest that these are epochal processes and
that the number of countries capable of getting even to
the threshold conditions of an “open access order” char-
acterized by rule of law is extraordinarily narrow (North,
Wallis and Weingast 2009).
In sum, although there is little strong theory about the
conditions that will give rise to robust rule of law, we can
extract competing expectations. A handful of studies,
and the expectations of the community of practitioners
working on postwar reconstruction, see the end of fight-
ing as providing an opening that can result in quite dra-
matic changes in the rule of law. Against this expectation
are a daunting set of institutional prerequisites that
appear the result only of very long-run historical process,
such as economic growth or fundamental political or cul-
tural change. To this must be added a daunting endoge-
neity problem. As Fearon (2010) and Walter (2011) have
argued, weak governance is implicated in the descent
into civil war in the first place. As a result, long-run
socioeconomic factors may matter not only for the onset
of and duration of civil wars—the most frequently stud-
ied outcomes in the civil war literature—but for the like-
lihood that the rule of law can be rebuilt in the postwar
setting.
What do the data say?
Data and Methodology
To pursue our inquiry, we have constructed a data set of 47
civil war cases in which the conflict in question ended
between 1970 and 1999. This truncation of the postwar
period yields a data set that is smaller than a number of
those used in the civil war literature, including Fearon and
Laitin (2003, examining 127 conflicts from 1945 to 2000 in
72 countries) and Doyle and Sambanis (2000, analyzing
multiple conflicts in 119 countries since 1945). Moreover,
although we consider a total of 47 cases, data are not even
available for all of them on a consistent basis, and as a
result, we consider shifting subsamples acknowledging the
risk that “missingness” of the data may not be wholly
random (Ross 2006; Rıos-Figueroa and Staton 2012).
Nonetheless, this loss of observations is an inevitable
feature of the efforts to consider post-conflict rule of law
and is characteristic of the limited number of studies we
have (Chen et al. 2008; Walter 2011). This disability is
offset by two crucial methodological considerations: our
desire to compare the conflict and post-conflict period
with the pre-civil war status quo ante and our interest in
considering postwar periods of adequate duration to pro-
vide reasonable tests. No one would expect that the end
of armed conflict—and particularly intense conflict—
would yield an instantaneous improvement in the rule of
407
law. We therefore want to consider at least five post-civil
war years, and more where possible.2
In contrast to some of the civil war literature, the unit
of observation is the country, not the conflict, because of
the nature of existing rule-of-law measures. The start and
end of conflicts is determined from the beginning and
end of continuous fighting (measured as 1,000 battle
deaths) even if this may include several different conflicts
occurring at the same time. If a country has experienced
several conflicts with more than 1 year between conflicts,
we only evaluate the aftermath of the most recent conflict
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within the time period covered by the data set.
As we noted above, the rule of law is clearly a multidi-
mensional concept, and we want to provide as wide-rang-
ing an evaluation as possible rather than focusing on a
single indicator. Our primary focus is on three clusters of
variables associated with the underlying concept for
which we can provide a full panel of pre-conflict, conflict,
and post-conflict observations. We start with the protec-
tion of political and civil liberties. These indicators
capture rule of law at the individual level: the extent to
which basic freedoms are safeguarded (Rajagopal 2008;
Kleinfeld 2012). Although sometimes seen as distinct
from the rule of law narrowly conceived, protection of
political and civil liberties is either a necessary condition
for the rule of law or a distinctive component of it (see
particularly Weingast 1997; Haggard et al. 2008; Kleinfeld
2012). We consider two discrete Freedom House
measures of civil liberties (FH civil liberties) and political
rights (FH political rights).
A second set of measures captures constraints on
executive power, the classic conception of checks and bal-
ances. Such constraints ensure that executive discretion is
bounded and that the interpretation of the law is not
dependent on the identity of those in power. Executive
constraints are captured by measures created by Polity
(Polity executive constraints) and Withold Henisz (Henisz
executive constraints). These measures differ in approach as
well as institutions considered. The Polity measure
focuses on institutional constraints on the chief executive
while the Henisz indicator measures the possibility of a
change in policy given both the structure of a country’s
political institutions (number of veto points) and the
preferences of the political actors in these institutions
(partisan alignment and homogeneity of preferences
within each branch). We also include Henisz’ judicial
independence measure (Henisz judicial independence),
widely held as central to the rule of law, although it does
not in fact show much variation.
The third component of the rule of law is the integrity
and protection of property rights, the conception of rule
of law most central to economic treatments of the subject
(for example, Dam 2006). Property rights are captured
using the Heritage Foundation’s protection of property
rights indicator (HF property).
2
Put differently, we do not include any countries where war is still ongo-
ing as of 1999, defined by battle deaths of >1,000 in a given year. The coun-
tries with ongoing wars as of 2002 are Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Burundi,
Colombia, DPR Congo, India, Indonesia, Israel, Liberia, Nepal, Philippines,
Russia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda. While our total
sample covers 47 countries, our ability to compare the rule of law in the pre-
and post-conflict period is limited to a smaller sample of 35–37 countries
because of the long duration of a number of conflicts and the lack of cover-
age for some of the variables in the pre-war period. Further, for some of the
variables, not all 47 countries have data available as mentioned in Appendix 2.
This poses issues of missing data which Rıos-Figueroa and Staton (2012) show
may bias results.
408 The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings
The extent of democracy might be seen as an indicator
of the rule of law. We find this argument a conceptual
stretch, since most definitions of democracy include
features of political institutions, such as competitive elec-
tions, that are not directly related to the concept. None-
theless, we provide information on the widely used Polity
regime type score as a memo item.
As noted, we focus first on the foregoing variables
because we have data on them for the pre-conflict, con-
flict, and post-conflict periods. In our structural break
analysis, however, we consider trends in the post-conflict
period and thus are able to explore two other rule-of-law
measures as well. The first is the World Bank’s corruption
control measure (WB corruption). Corruption—defined
most simply as the private abuse of public office—clearly
distorts the rule of law, which rests fundamentally on con-
ceptions of impartiality. Second, we examine the World
Bank’s rule-of-law index (WB rule of law ), a measure that
incorporates a number of discrete components of the
rule of law and comports with the observation that the
rule of law is a multidimensional concept. The World
Bank indicators can only be used for consideration of a
limited number of cases because they are only available
from 1996 onward. Nonetheless, the findings using this
index generally concur with those for the broader range
of measures. A more detailed consideration for the cod-
ing of these variables is provided in Appendix 1.
Using this data set, we employ three methods for mea-
suring the development of the rule of law in post-conflict
settings. The first method involves comparing averages of
rule-of-law indicators for our sample of countries for
three distinct time periods: pre-conflict, conflict, and
post-conflict. The second method involves simple regres-
sion analysis of the correlates of post-conflict rule of law,
again using all the available countries and data. The final
method, the structural break analysis, focuses on the tra-
jectory of each rule-of-law variable for each individual
country and seeks to identify whether the termination of
civil conflict is associated with an inflection in the rule of
law.
Rule of Law Before, During, and After Conflict
The spirit of our effort is to stick to descriptive statistics
of rule-of-law variables before, after, and during conflict.
Distinguishing these three periods allows us to make
three sets of comparisons for each of our variables of
interest:
1. The pre-conflict period and the civil war years, show-
ing the effect of fighting on the rule of law;
2. The civil war years and the five and 10-year postwar
periods, showing the extent to which rule of law
improves in the postwar period;
3. The pre-conflict and post-conflict periods, capturing
the extent to which the postwar period marked an
improvement over the pre-war status quo ante, a
reversion to it, or even a regression.
The most striking finding of our analysis is that there
is not as sharp a difference across any of the three peri-
ods for the variables tested as we might expect. Civil wars
do have effects on the rule of law; there is a drop in
some of the scores during the period of conflict as com-
pared to the average scores in the 5 years before a con-
flict commences. But most of these changes are not
statistically significant. Even when countries do improve
on their rule-of-law scores in the postwar period, the
scores remain low, gains are substantively modest, and
they do not typically observe a marked improvement over
the pre-conflict status quo.
We can see this more clearly by considering each of
the three comparisons outlined above. Some countries
have missing data in the pre-conflict and conflict peri-
ods. Therefore, to ensure that our sample constitutes a
true panel for each variable we include only countries
for which the indicator in question is available for the
relevant time periods being compared. In other words,
the countries analyzed for any given indicator are the
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same across all three time periods even at the cost of
reducing the sample size. As a result, we report on
fewer than the full 47 countries in the data set and for
one of the variables (Heritage Foundation property rights)
we are able to produce only a conflict–post-conflict com-
parison.
Because of the small sample size, we are particularly
vigilant about the possible effect of outliers on sample
means. In our sample, both Peru and Croatia are clear
outliers. The structural break analysis shows that they
both exhibit large improvements in a number of areas.
Croatia showed a statistically significant improvement on
seven of eight indicators. Peru, although not quite as suc-
cessful as Croatia, also exhibited substantial improvement
on a number of indicators. In the tables, we have indi-
cated with an asterisk where results are affected by
removal of these two cases; as can be seen, changes in
two of the rule-of-law indicators are driven by the inclu-
sion of these two cases.
In Tables 1 through 3, we provide a descriptive sum-
mary of our difference-of-means tests. The three tables
show the differences among the three periods that we
have just outlined: pre-conflict and conflict, conflict and
post-conflict, and pre- and post-conflict. We note whether
there is a statistically significant improvement or deterio-
ration in the variables in question or whether there is no
significant difference between the time periods.
Table 1 displays the difference between the pre-conflict
and conflict periods. To our surprise, civil war did not
result in a robust deterioration across rule-of-law mea-
sures.3 While some of the conflict averages appear smaller
than the average for the 5 years directly preceding the
onset of the conflict, only one rule-of-law measure is
found to deteriorate to a statistically significant extent:
the FH measure of civil liberties. The average of FH Civil
Liberties scores for the countries with available data
decreased from 3.37 (out of 7) to 2.91. This confirms the
theoretical expectation that civil wars affect the rule of
law in part through decreased civil liberties. Two other
variables showed statistically significant differences
between the pre-conflict and conflict periods: FH political
rights and Henisz’ executive constraints. However, these
changes are in the opposite direction from what might
be anticipated and thus anomalous; these measures actu-
ally improve during the conflict. These results appear
anomalous, but they can be explained by a particular
combination of political developments: new democracies
3
Although not a rule-of-law variable, we also tested for the effect of war
on national income—as measured by per capita GDP—which is also strongly
correlated with the strength of the rule of law (Barro 1997). GDP per capita
decreases from just over $3,154 pre-conflict to just under $2,824 during the
conflict, but the decline is not statistically significant. This difference is proba-
bly not enough to have a significant adverse indirect effect on our rule-of-law
measures. But given what we know about the relationship between national
income and the rule of law it certainly does not help that civil war is associ-
ated with economic stagnation or even decline.
 Stephan Haggard and Lydia Tiede 409

TABLE 1. Comparison of Pre-conflict and Conflict Averages

Direction of Significant t-Test

Variable N Pre-Conflict Conflict Change Difference? (p-Value)

Civil Liberties, Freedom House (FH) 35 3.37 (0.20) 2.91 (0.17) ↓ Yes 2.67 (.01)
Political Rights, FH 35 3.32 (0.23) 4.08 (0.22) ↑ Yes
2.54 (.02)
Executive Constraints, Polity 35 2.63 (0.29) 2.89 (0.27) ↑ No 0.87 (.39)
Executive constraints, Henisz 35 0.12 (0.03) 0.21 (0.03) ↑ Yes
2.65 (.01)
Judicial Independence, Henisz 35 0.05 (0.04) 0.07 (0.03) ↑ No
0.31 (.76)
Democracy/Autocracy, Polity 37
3.29 (0.83)
1.96 (0.79) ↑ No
1.98 (.06)
(Notes. Statistical significance is assessed at *p < .05 level, and if significant at this level a “Yes” appears in bold under the column “Significant Difference?”

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Freedom House civil liberties and political rights scores measure 1–7 with higher scores meaning more free. Polity executive constraints range from 1 to 7 with
higher scores reflecting more checks on the executive. Henisz constraints, ranging from 0 to 1, reflect higher scores when there are more constraints. Henisz judi-
cial independence scores range from 0 (no judicial independence) to 1 (judicial independence). Polity 2 democracy scores range from +10 (strongly democratic)
to
10 (strongly autocratic).)

TABLE 2. Comparison of Conflict and Five and 10 Years Post-Conflict Average

# Post-Conflict Direction of Significant t-Test

Variable N Years Conflict Post-Conflict Change Difference? (p-Value)

Civil Liberties, Freedom House (FH) 35 5 2.91 (0.17) 4.65 (0.20) ↑ Yes
5.01 (.00)
10 3.52 (0.20) ↑ Yes
4.10 (.00)
Political Rights, FH 35 5 4.08 (0.22) 4.56 (0.26) ↑ No
1.36 (.18)
10 3.52 (0.27) ↓ No 1.60 (.12)
Executive Constraints, Polity 34 5 2.89 (0.27) 3.45 (0.30) ↑ Yes
2.33 (.00)
10 3.66 (0.29) ↑ Yes
3.04 (.00)
Executive Constraints, Henisz 35 5 0.21 (0.03) 0.28 (0.04) ↑ No
1.94 (.06)
10 0.31 (0.04) ↑ Yes
2.56 (.02)
Judicial Independence, Henisz 35 5 0.07 (0.03) 0.13 (0.05) ↑ No
1.50 (.14)
10 0.17 (0.05) ↑ Yes
2.37 (.02)
Property Rights, Heritage Foundation (HF) 18 5 37.44 (4.08) 35.78 (17.32) ↓ No 1.04 (.31)
10 33.63 (3.45) ↓ Yes 2.38 (.03)
16† 10 35.88 (4.44) 33.40 (3.86) ↓ No 1.78 (.10)
Democracy/Autocracy, Polity 37 5
1.96 (0.80)
1.05 (0.00) ↑ No
1.17 (.25)
10
0.31 (0.94) ↑ Yes
2.15 (.04)
35† 10
2.12 (0.80)
0.61 (0.98) ↑ No
1.90 (.07)
(Notes. Statistical significance is assessed at *p < .05 level, and if significant at this level for samples with and without the outliers a “Yes” appears in bold under the
column “Significant Difference?” “Yes” or “No” are italicized and not in bold if statistical significance is not sustained for both samples with and without outliers.
Freedom House civil liberties and political rights scores measure 1–7 with higher scores meaning more free. Polity executive constraints range from 1 to 7 with
higher scores reflecting more checks on the executive. Henisz constraints, ranging from 0 to 1, reflect higher scores when there are more constraints. Henisz
judicial independence scores range from 0 (no judicial independence) to 1 (judicial independence). Heritage Foundation property rights ranges from 0 to 100,
where higher scores mean a higher degree of protection for property rights. Polity 2 democracy scores range from +10 (strongly democratic) to
10 (strongly
autocratic).
†
Results for this row provide the difference-of-means test when the two highest performing countries are removed and the result is no longer significant).

that subsequently face insurgencies. For example, Turkey
underwent political liberalization after 1982, but civil
conflict with the Kurds ensues from 1984. Similarly,
Peru’s transition from military rule to an elected govern-
ment was plagued by the concurrent Shining Path insur-
gency.
Although we do not define democracy as a component
of the rule of law per se, it is interesting to note that Polity
Democracy scores actually improve from the pre-conflict
(
3.29) to conflict setting (
1.96), but this improvement
is not statistically significant. As with executive con-
straints, this suggests that democratization can run con-
currently with civil conflict as noted in our discussion of
Turkey and Peru.
Table 2 includes comparisons of the average scores
between the conflict period and both the five and 10-year
post-conflict periods. These comparisons yield some rays
of hope. We see statistically significant improvements in
four variables: FH civil liberties scores improve during
the first five post-civil conflict years, although this pro-
gress actually attenuates after 10 post-conflict years (from
2.91 to 4.65 within a 5-year period and from 2.91 to 3.52
in a 10-year period). Put differently, improvements in
civil liberties in postwar settings are non-monotonic,
improving initially before reverting, although not fully,
toward the conflict mean.
Polity’s executive constraint measure also shows
improvement from 2.89 to 3.45 within 5 years of a con-
flict ceasing and 3.66 within 10 years. Henisz’s executive
constraint and judicial independence measures both
improve by the tenth post-conflict year. Such findings
suggest that the end of fighting has the effect of reducing
executive discretion not only through an improvement in
civil liberties, but perhaps through the causal mechanism
of placing new constraints on executives as well. Property
rights show no improvement in this comparison, unless
we include our high performing outliers. Using the full
sample with outliers, democracy seems to improve
between the conflict and post-conflict periods, but only
when 10 years of post-conflict data are included. This
result does not hold when Croatia and Peru are removed
from the sample.
410 The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings

TABLE 3. Comparison of Pre-conflict and Five and 10 Years Average Post-conflict

# Post-Conflict Direction of Significant. t-Test

Variable N Years Pre-Conflict Post-Conflict Change Difference? (p-Value)

Civil Liberties, Freedom 35 5 3.37 (0.20) 4.65 (0.20) ↑ Yes
3.78 (.00)
House (FH) 10 3.51 (0.20) ↑ No
0.63 (.54)
Political Rights, FH 35 5 3.32 (0.23) 4.56 (0.26) ↑ Yes
3.10 (.00)
10 3.52 (0.27) ↑ No
0.69 (.49)
Executive Constraints, Polity 35 5 2.63 (0.29) 3.46 (0.30) ↑ Yes
2.63 (.01)
10 3.66 (0.30) ↑ Yes
3.21 (.00)
Executive Constraints, Henisz 35 5 0.12 (0.03) 0.28 (0.05) ↑ Yes
3.76 (.00)

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10 0.31 (0.04) ↑ Yes
4.37 (.00)
Judicial Independence, Henisz 35 5 0.05 (0.04) 0.13 (0.05) ↑ No
1.38 (.18)
10 0.17 (0.05) ↑ Yes
2.37 (.02)
33† 10 0.05 (0.04) 0.16 (0.05) ↑ No
1.61 (.12)
Democracy/Autocracy, Polity 37 5
3.29 (0.83)
1.04 (0.99) ↑ Yes
2.19 (.03)
10
0.31 (0.95) ↑ Yes
2.98 (.01)
35† 5
3.28 (0.87)
1.17 (1.04) ↑ No
1.97 (.09)
(Notes. Statistical significance is assessed at *p < .05 level, and if significant at this level for samples with and without the outliers a “Yes” appears in bold under the
column “Significant Difference?” “Yes” or “No” are italicized and not in bold if statistical significance is not sustained for both samples with and without outliers.
Freedom House civil liberties and political rights scores measure 1–7 with higher scores meaning more free. Polity executive constraints range from 1 to 7 with
higher scores reflecting more checks on the executive. Henisz constraints, ranging from 0 to 1, reflect higher scores when there are more constraints. Henisz judi-
cial independence scores range from 0 (no judicial independence) to 1 (judicial independence). Polity 2 democracy scores range from +10 (strongly democratic)
to
10 (strongly autocratic).
†
Results for this row provide the difference-of-means test when the two highest performing countries are removed and the result is no longer significant).

The improvement between the conflict and post-con-
flict periods, however, may mask the fact that measures
of the rule of law are simply reverting to the pre-con-
flict mean; Table 3 shows that this appears to be the
case. There is a statistically significant improvement in
civil liberties and political rights scores in the first five
post-conflict years when compared to the status quo
ante. But these developments are clearly fragile and are
not sustained through the 10-year post-conflict period.
The only variables showing a consistent improvement
between the pre- and post-conflict periods are the two
executive constraint measurements. Polity’s measure
improves from 2.63 to 3.46 within 5 years and to 3.66
within 10 years. Henisz shows improvement from 0.12
to 0.28 within 5 years and from 0.12 to 0.31 within
10 years.
The modesty of the changes between the pre- and
post-conflict periods is noteworthy. Executive constraint
scores for both the Polity and Henisz measures are
instructive. Shifts in both these variables are not trivial,
but they barely move the sample of countries above a
mean score of 0 for the entire post-conflict period.
Although not a component of how we define rule of law,
similar modesty can be seen in the movement of democ-
racy scores. With the outliers removed, there is no
improvement within 5 years post-conflict. However,
democracy scores do improve after a 10-year period,
changing from an average of
3.29 pre-conflict to an
average of
0.31 post-conflict. This result holds when we
remove the outliers.
The tenuous nature of improvement becomes more
readily apparent if we consider the findings by indicator,
in effect reading along the rows rather than columns of
the three tables. Henisz executive constraints is the only
rule-of-law measure which shows a statistically significant
change in all three periods, increasing during the conflict
period and then increasing further after the conflict has
ceased. Regime type—although not our central preoccu-
pation—is exemplary. There is not much change between
the pre-conflict, conflict, and post-conflict periods on
Polity scores. Civil conflict countries have low scores
going into conflict. Although there appears to be deterio-
ration during the civil war and a small rebound after,
these changes still leave countries squarely in autocratic
territory.
In other words, even when there are statistically signifi-
cant changes, the post-conflict rule-of-law scores on aver-
age remain low. These results all suggest that countries
that experience civil war tend to have weak rule of law
going into it and tend to revert to their pre-conflict level
after the fighting stops with the possible exception of
executive constraints. This suspicion becomes even more
apparent when we introduce some controls into a very
simple multivariate model and when we consider the
results of our structural break analysis.
Determinants of Post-Conflict Rule of Law: Introducing
Some Controls
We self-consciously keep our models simple. One of the
most robust findings in the civil war literature is that the
likelihood of both war onset and recurrence is a function
of level of development. Poor countries are more likely
to experience civil conflict, whether because of the weak
repressive capacity of the state (Fearon and Laitin 2003)
or the low opportunity costs of turning to violence on
the part of rebels (Gates 2002; Collier and Hoeffler 2004;
Walter 2004, 2011). Naturally, these same risks operate in
the postwar context and are even compounded by civil
war’s destructive effects (Chen et al. 2008). As Doyle and
Sambanis (2000:785) argue, “more developed economies
with lower levels of poverty should be both better able to
rebuild after war and less susceptible to wars stemming
from economic grievance.”
Second, we would expect more intense and longer con-
flicts to pose greater challenges to reconstructing the rule
of law. Following other work on civil war we use battle
deaths as a measure of a war’s intensity. Some might
argue that this expectation is not straightforward. It may
be that more substantial conflicts provide the foundation
for more substantial improvements in the post-conflict
period. But as we show, the question is moot. The expec-
 Stephan Haggard and Lydia Tiede
TABLE 4. Determinants of Post-Conflict Rule of Law: Pre-Conflict Rule of Law, Conflict Intensity, and GDP Per Capita
Civil Liberties
Variables Freedom House (FH)
Rule-of-Law Pre-Conflict Average 0.334 (0.167)*
Ln(GDP p.c.1st Post-Conflict Year) 0.408 (0.261)
War Intensity (Ln(Sum Battle Deaths)
0.118 (0.0855)
Constant 0.384 (2.154)
Number of Observations 34
Adjusted R2 0.257
(Notes. Standard errors in parentheses; ***p < .01, **p < .05, *p < .10).
tation that the intensity of violence influences the path of
rule of law in the post-conflict period does not hold one
way or the other.
We run simple multivariate models that control for
GDP per capita (more precisely, log GDP per capita in
the first post-conflict year) and civil war intensity (log of
the sum of battle deaths during the conflict, following
Doyle and Sambanis 2000). Results using an alternative
measure for war intensity, namely a war’s duration, can
be found in Online Appendix 1, Table OA1.1.4 We do
this for four of the variables discussed above. We are
unable to perform this analysis for Henisz’ judicial inde-
pendence variable as there are not enough pre-conflict
data with variation on this variable to make it viable. We
also include the average of the pre-conflict rule of law.
Our general model is thus as follows:
Rule of law post-conflict average ¼
b0 þ b1 rule of law pre-conflict average
þ b2 LnðGDP p.c. 1st post-conflict yearÞ
þ b3 War intensity þ 
It should be emphasized that a causal test of these rela-
tionships would need to address the complex problems
of endogeneity, and particularly the possibility—indeed
the likelihood—that low income is a determinant of both
pre-conflict rule-of-law measures and the onset of con-
flict, as well as post-conflict rule of law. But our objective
is not to explore the underlying causes of the rule of law,
but simply to suggest the extent to which post-conflict
rule of law is bounded by the pre-conflict status quo ante.
The relationship between these three factors and our
various measures of rule-of-law variables are found in
Table 4. There are several noteworthy findings. First,
there is no relationship between GDP per capita and
average post-conflict rule of law once we control for pre-
conflict rule of law. A closer analysis of the cases reveals
that the relationship between income per capita and the
rule of law is by no means linear. For example, when we
look at countries with per capita GDP of <$5,000, we find
that levels of executive constraints are low. But there are
some countries with levels of per capita GDP above
$5,000 that also perform quite poorly in this regard (for
example, Oman). Similarly, we see a number of low-
income countries that saw some increases in rule of law,
including Mozambique and Peru. The finding on the
relationship between GDP per capita and rule of law can
be given a hopeful interpretation; poverty per se does not
foreclose better rule of law.
4
All of the online appendices cited in this article can be found on the
author’s Web site at https://sites.google.com/site/ltiede/home/arti-
cles-and-data.
411
Political Ex. Constraints Ex. Constraints
Rights FH Polity Henisz
0.286 (0.194) 0.391 (0.169)** 0.559 (0.227)**
0.475 (0.352) 0.221 (0.357) 0.0508 (0.0539)

0.197 (0.115)*
0.0842 (0.136)
0.0199 (0.0183)
0.817 (2.882) 1.709 (3.329) 0.0246 (0.471)
34 35 35
0.223 0.178 0.230
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A second finding is that conflict intensity is not corre-
lated with post-conflict averages one way or the other;
moreover, this finding generally is robust whether we
measure intensity as the log of the sum of battle deaths
in a conflict or duration of conflict (See Online Appen-
dix 1, Table OA1.1). Again, this finding may be given a
positive interpretation. The intensity of the conflict does
not appear to set the stage for more robust improvement
in the rule of law, but it does not deter it either.
The only variable which shows any consistency is pre-
conflict rule of law. Although the overall explanatory
power of the model is not particularly strong, pre-conflict
history appears to place important bounds on the extent
and speed to which the rule of law may improve in a
post-conflict setting. This variable is significant at conven-
tional levels when the dependent variable is either of the
measurements for executive constraints. It also is signifi-
cant at the 0.10 level when civil liberties is the outcome
variable of interest. Prior political rights scores are the
only rule-of-law measure for which pre-conflict scores
have no effect on post-conflict scores.
Structural Break Analysis
The previous sections have presented simple difference-
of-means tests and regressions. A more nuanced way to
test for change is structural break analysis. Difference-of-
means tests and regression models have the advantage of
pooling observations and showing the differences in
means across time periods. Structural break analysis, by
contrast, can be used to show how the various measures
of the rule of law evolve in each individual country
case. Because post-conflict political developments are
determined by a variety of factors that may be country-
specific, looking at the time trends of key variables in
each country separately allows us to effectively control for
unobserved country-level variables that are masked when
the data are pooled. Structural break analysis also allows
us to determine whether and when there is a break in
the time series of each rule-of-law measurement for each
country in the data set. We can thus see not only whether
the rule of law improves or deteriorates, but whether the
end of civil conflict is associated with an inflection in the
series. This is admittedly a somewhat stringent test,
because the rule of law might improve at some point
after the conflict ends as a result of it having ended.
Nonetheless, our analysis does not allow us to test for this
possibility; we focus instead on the question of whether
the termination of conflict in and of itself leads to a shift
in the path of the rule of law.
We use the Clemente, Monta~ nes and Reyes (1998) unit
root test, employing both the Additive-Outlier (AO) and
Innovative-Outlier (IO) methods (Perron 1989). The AO
412 The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings
model is used to test whether structural breaks are sudden
and abrupt. The IO model, in turn, demonstrates whether
there is a gradual shift in the mean of the dependent vari-
able. The use of both of these tests mitigates the concern
that improvements in the rule of law may come only
gradually with the end of conflict. We record the results
of both of these analyses for each country in the Online
Appendix 2, Table OA.2.1. These methods allow us to
test not only for whether an “optimal break” has
occurred, but whether it occurred after the conflict had
stopped. If optimal breaks are significant and occur after
the conflict for each country, this means that there is
some evidence that conflict cessation had a significant
impact on the trend in the given rule-of-law measure in
that country. Significant breaks at other times, such as
the start of conflict or a transition to democracy, suggest
that other events have more impact on the rule of law
than the cessation of conflict per se, although these events
may themselves be endogenous to the end of civil con-
flict. Similarly, inflections that occur sometime after the
conflict ends do not necessarily mean that cessation of
conflict had no impact, but rather demonstrate that the
end of the conflict per se is not a proximate or immediate
cause of the effect. Finally, if optimal breaks are not sig-
nificant, it implies that the variables analyzed are rela-
tively stable and the end of the conflict had little effect
on the evolution of the rule of law one way or the other.
For the remaining portion of our analysis, we want to
summarize how many countries improve or deteriorate
over a certain amount of time. Due to data limitations,
we are constrained to drop six countries from our origi-
nal sample of 47 countries that either do not have
10 years of post-conflict data, have missing data on key
comparison variables, or there is a gap in data coverage
after the conflict ends. We then divide the remaining 41
cases into two subsamples. The first subsample consists of
20 countries for which we have consistent postwar cover-
age for all eight rule-of-law variables. These include the
variables considered in the previous two sections: democ-
racy (that is, Polity), the two FH measures of civil and
political liberties, and the Henisz executive constraints
measures. These measures have long temporal coverage,
going back to the mid-1940s for some countries. For
three measures—the World Bank’s corruption control
and aggregate rule-of-law measurements, and the Heri-
tage property rights measure—data are only available
from the mid-1990s onward, but this coverage is not
problematic because of the timing of the end of civil war
TABLE 5. Rule-of-Law Revival Scores (Eight Rule-of-Law Indicators,
10 Years Post-Conflict, N = 20)
Indicators Showing Number of
Improvement or Deterioration Country Cases
Strong Improvement 1 advanced and regressed on the same number of
(+6 to +8) Croatia
Modest Improvement 5 gation is conveying a broad portrait of the extent to
(+3 to +5) Georgia, Iraq, Peru, Rwanda, Turkey
Status Quo (
2 to +2) 13
Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Congo,
Egypt, Guatemala, Haiti, Mali,
Myanmar, Pakistan, Senegal, South
Africa, Tajikistan, Yemen
Modest Deterioration 1
(
3 to
5) Papua New Guinea
Strong Deterioration 0
(
6 to
8)
in these cases. Selecting countries for which there is con-
sistent coverage reduces the size of the sample signifi-
cantly, but allows us to look at a wider basket of rule-of-
law measures.
The second sample used for our structural break analy-
sis consists of 20 countries where only the first five vari-
ables are consistently available. These are countries where
the conflict ended prior to the mid-1990s, and coverage
of the last three variables noted above is therefore not
available. However, for this subsample of cases, we were
able to extend our analysis beyond the initial 10-year
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post-conflict period. We indicate whether structural
breaks occurred within 10, 15, and 20 years of the con-
flict ending, and for a greatly reduced subsample of only
11 cases, we consider whether there are changes after
more than 20 years of the conflict ending.
In Appendix 2 and Online Appendix 2, Table OA2.1,
we provide a full listing of all the countries in the data
set. Appendix 2 provides a summary of all of our findings
indicating whether a structural break occurring after the
conflict was significant and led to improvement (+) or
deterioration (
). This summary table also indicates the
number of years it took for the statistically significant
improvement or deterioration. A zero denotes no change;
MD denotes missing data.
Online Appendix 2, Table OA2.1 provides the raw
results of the structural breaks analysis and highlights
where there are rule-of-law improvements and deteriora-
tions. We are able to say something about the amount of
time it takes to get change by noting the number of
structural breaks that take place after 10 years. Recall that
the data set was designed to optimize for 10 years of post-
conflict data, and thus, the panel is uneven after 10 years.
Nonetheless, the findings are instructive.
To more easily summarize the large amount of struc-
tural break data, we construct an aggregate “rule-of-law
revival score” for each country. This revival score is simply
the net number of variables for which countries show a
statistically significant post-conflict break in the given
time period. To calculate these scores, we assign +1 if a
country showed statistically significant improvement post-
conflict and
1 if the country showed deterioration on a
particular indicator. For the first sample, where eight vari-
ables are available, the theoretical range of the revival
scores is from
8 (a case in which all measures deterio-
rate) to +8 (a case in which they all improve); in the sam-
ple, the actual range is from
3 to +7. For the second
sample, where five variables are available, the rule-of-law
revival scores can range in theory from
5 to +5; the
actual range is from
5 to +4.
One disadvantage of this simple aggregation is that
similar scores may not reflect similar trajectories. For
example, a country that fails to improve on any dimen-
sion would receive a zero. But so would a country that
dimensions. Yet despite this drawback, the simple aggre-
which the rule of law is improving.
Tables 5 and 6 show the results for this exercise and
underline an even greater need for caution than sug-
gested by the simple difference-of-means test reported
above. Table 5 suggests that of 20 countries analyzed in
the first subsample, thirteen show little or no net change
in rule-of-law scores in the post-conflict period. Five coun-
tries (Georgia, Iraq, Peru, Rwanda, and Turkey) show
modest improvement on three to five indicators, and one
country (Croatia) shows strong improvement as evi-
 Stephan Haggard and Lydia Tiede
TABLE 6. Rule-of-Law Revival Scores (Five Indicators, 10, 15 and 20 Post-Conflict Years)
10 Years of Post-Conflict
Data and Performance at
10 Years (N = 20)
Number of Indicators
Strong Improvement (+4 to +5) 1 1
Argentina
Modest Improvement (+2 to +3) 4 8
Kenya, Namibia,
Nicaragua, Thailand
Status Quo (
1 to +1) 14
Djibouti, El Salvador,
Ethiopia, Jordan, Laos,
Moldova, Morocco,
Mozambique, Niger,
Oman, Syria, Vietnam,
Yemen PR, Zimbabwe
Modest Deterioration (
2 to
3) 0 1
Strong Deterioration (
4 to
5) 1 1
Iran
denced by significant post-conflict improvements on 7 of
the 8 indicators. One country with modest deterioration
is Papua New Guinea.
The results from Table 6 repeat the exercise for the
subsample of countries for which only five indicators are
analyzed; however, as noted, this subsample allows us to
consider a longer post-conflict time period for some
cases. The findings are generally consistent with those for
the first subsample. Most countries remain at the status
quo. Within the first 10 years of the conflict ending, 14
countries show little improvement or deterioration. Four
of the countries (Kenya, Namibia, Nicaragua, and Thai-
land) show modest improvement, and one (Argentina)
shows strong improvement on 4 of 5 indicators. In the
10-year post-conflict period, only one country shows
strong deterioration—Iran—with structural breaks in a
negative direction on all five indicators analyzed in this
sample.
Extending the analysis to countries which all have
15 years of data (N = 17) and looking at rule-of-law move-
ment at 15 years post-conflict yields a marginally more
hopeful picture that improvements in the rule of law are
simply a matter of time. Eight countries show modest
post-conflict improvement, but six countries show little or
no improvement and Zimbabwe shows modest deteriora-
tion and Iran strong deterioration. For the even smaller
subsample of countries for which we have 20 years or
more of post-conflict data, a total of 11 countries, the
majority (7) show modest improvement. However, Zimba-
bwe shows modest deterioration and Iran shows strong
deterioration.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper is modest: to simply map
changes in the rule of law in post-conflict settings. The
diagnostics are sobering. Difference-of-means tests sug-
gested modest improvements in three rule-of-law indica-
tors between the conflict and post-conflict period: civil
liberties, judicial independence, and restraints on execu-
tive authority. These findings would comport with our
413
15 Years of Post-Conflict 20 Years of Post-Conflict
Data and Performance at Data and Performance at
15 Years (N = 17) 20 years (N = 11)
Number of Country Cases
1
Argentina Argentina
7
Jordon, Kenya, Laos, Jordan, Namibia, Nigeria, Oman, Syria,
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Namibia, Nicaragua, Thailand, Vietnam
Nigeria, Oman, Thailand
6 1
Moldova, Morocco, Yemen PR
Mozambique, Syria,
Vietnam, Yemen PR
1
Zimbabwe Zimbabwe
1
Iran Iran
intuition that civil wars are associated with an increase in
executive discretion and a corresponding reduction in
liberties. Simply terminating the conflict might thus
improve the rule of law by eliminating the political
pressures for an attenuation of the rule of law.
However, we found that these improvements consti-
tuted at best a return to the pre-war status quo ante. Sim-
ple regressions found that pre-conflict rule of law was a
powerful determinant of the post-conflict rule of law.
Moreover, more refined structural break analysis found
that very few countries showed significant improvement
in the rule of law in the post-conflict period. The share
of countries showing improvement in the rule of law was
somewhat larger when we were able to extend the time
period of our tests, but even this finding was far from
clear; for a small subsample of cases with over 20 years of
data, the number of cases showing marked improvements
was limited.
Our purpose was not to explain variation in the rule of
law in postwar settings, but such an exercise is an obvious
place to extend the analysis of the rule of law in post-con-
flict settings that we begin here. What, for example,
might explain differential success in rebuilding the
rule of law in postwar settings? For example, does the nat-
ure of the civil war settlement influence the subsequent
path of the rule of law? Does third party intervention
improve the prospects for political and legal develop-
ment? In a separate analysis reported in Online
Appendix 3 (Tables OA3.1 to OA3.4) and Online
Appendix 4 (Tables OA4.1 to OA4.4), we conduct some
preliminary analysis along these lines and found that how
conflicts end, and UN intervention has some effect, but
they are not consistent across rule-of-law variables. For
example, we found that conflicts that ended by settle-
ment or truce had the effect of increasing FH Political
Rights scores in the 10-year post-conflict period. But
truces or settlements did not appear to affect other mea-
sures of the rule of law.
To date, some quantitative studies of the effects of
UN intervention, such as those by Doyle and Sambanis
(2000) and Hartzell and Hoddie (2007), find that UN
414 The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings
intervention has a positive effect on ending violence or
sustaining the peace respectively. However, qualitative
studies on rule of law post-conflict reach more skeptical
conclusions or even suggest adverse effects (Popkin
2000; Brooks 2003; Rose-Ackerman 2004; Call 2007).
We find that UN intervention has positive effects on
both Polity and Henisz measures of constraints, which
could result from explicit constitutional engineering on
the part of outside parties. However, these effects did
not hold with respect to other measures of rule of law.
Further model specifications should be explored in
future research to deal with the complex issues of end-
ogeneity especially in regard to the influence of UN
intervention.
While such analysis is important, it is vital to underscore
that the variance to be explained appears slight. The chal-
lenge in post-conflict settings is not to reconstitute the rule
of law. The policy challenge is more daunting: to funda-
mentally alter the path of governance in countries in
which it was poor to begin with. Countries that descend
into civil war usually have systematic institutional problems
that both push them into conflict and that make postwar
political and legal reconstruction difficult.
For practical purposes, identifying these constraints
and possible “pressure points” is undoubtedly the most
important future research task. However, a reading of the
growing practical literature on postwar rule of law, gover-
nance, and security sector programs cited throughout this
article suggests several well-known clusters of constraints,
starting with the most basic resource ones. As we noted
in the introduction, building the rule of law is surpris-
ingly intensive not only in physical but particularly in
human capital; state-building requires resources that are
simply in short supply. Second, political constraints
deserve much more attention than they have received to
date. The rule of law has qualities of a public good,
which we know are typically undersupplied. To overcome
these constraints requires political coalitions with an
interest in improving the rule of law and paying the costs
of doing so. Such coalitions may be in particularly short
supply in postwar settings. Third, and more daunting still,
are fundamental normative and cultural constraints that
are fertile ground for more constructivist interpretations.
For rule of law to be viable, it must match lived expecta-
tions and experience and garner support from publics
that have typically lived through periods of weak gover-
nance.
Finally, there are the problems associated with outside
intervention. Not only do outside supporters of the rule of
law often lack adequate commitment and resources, but
they may make proposals that do not at all fit with lived
experience and thus prove fragile as a result. As with the
many other constraints on intervention in civil wars, our
expectations of the ability to rebuild—or build—the rule
of law also need to be correspondingly modest.
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Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information may be found in the
online version of this article:
Online Appendix 1. Alternative specification for Table
4 using duration as the measure of war intensity.
Online Appendix 2. Structural Break Analysis of Post-
Conflict Rule of Law.
Online Appendix 3. Civil War Settlement and Post-Con-
flict Rule of Law.
Online Appendix 4. UN Intervention and Post-Conflict
Rule of Law.
Appendix 1: Data Sources: Rule-of-Law Variable
Measurements
Rights: Freedom House Civil Liberties and Political Rights
Freedom House: this variable is measured on a scale of
1–7 with one being the most free and 7 the least free.
These variables have been rescaled such that higher
scores mean more free.
415
Institutional Constraints: Polity Executive Constraints
(Decision Rules)
This variable on a scale of 1–7 measures constraints on the
executive. “Operationally, this variable refers to the extent
of institutionalized constraints on the decision-making
powers of chief executives, whether individuals or collectiv-
ities.” 1 refers to the executive having unlimited authority,
while 7 refers to the fact that other groups have power
equal or greater than the executive in most areas.
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Institutional Constraints: Henisz
Constraints
Henisz veto points is “derived from a simple spatial
model and theoretically ranges from 0 to 1, with higher
scores indicating more political constraint and thus less
feasibility of policy change.” This measurement, improved
from a prior measure, also includes the judiciary and sub-
national entities as additional veto points.
Judicial Independence
Judicial independence is coded as a dummy variable of 1
if there is judicial independence and 0 if there is not.
Property Rights: Heritage Foundation
Property rights measures “the degree to which a country’s
laws protect private property rights and the degree to
which its government enforces those laws. It also accounts
for the possibility that private property will be expropri-
ated. In addition, it analyzes the independence of the
judiciary, the existence of corruption within the judiciary,
and the ability of individuals and businesses to enforce
contracts.” Scores range from 0 and 100, where higher
scores mean a higher degree of protection for property
rights.
World Bank
Control of Corruption
The World Bank’s measure of corruption control mea-
sures perceptions of corruption, conventionally defined
as the exercise of public power for private gain. Scores
range from
2.5 to 2.5, with higher scores meaning more
rule of law.
Rule of Law
“Rule of law” is an aggregate indicator that includes “per-
ceptions of the incidence of crime, the effectiveness and
predictability of the judiciary, and the enforceability of
contracts.” Scores range from
2.5 to 2.5, with higher
scores meaning more rule of law.
Democracy: Polity 2
The Polity score is a scale ranging from +10 (strongly
democratic) to
10 (strongly autocratic).
 416

Appendix 2: Statistically Significant Improvement in Rule-of-Law Scores Post-Conflict (Full Data Set)

Civil Liberties, Political Executive Executive Judicial Independence, Corruption, Rule of Law, Property,
Country Freedom House (FH) Rights, FH Constraints, Polity Constraints, Henisz Henisz WB WB Heritage Foundation

Argentina + in 2 years + in 2 years + in 4 years + in 8 years + in 13 years MD MD MD

Azerbaijan 0 0 0 0 0 + in 6 years + in 6 years 0
Bangladesh 0 0 0 0 0 + in 6 years
in 4 years 0
Bosnia + in 6 years + in 5 years 0 0 MD 0 0 0
Cambodia 0 0 MD 0 MD 0 0 0
CAR 0 0 0 0 MD + in 8 years + in 2 years 0
Chad 0 0 0 0 MD
in 5 years
in 4 years 0
Congo 0 0 0 0 0 0 + in 2 years 0
Croatia + in 3 years + in 2 years + in 2 years + in 2 years + in 2 years + in 3 years + in 3 years 0
Djibouti 0 0 + in 2 years 0 0 MD MD 0
Egypt 0 0 0 0 0
in 2 years
in 7 years 0
El Salvador 0 0 0 0 0 MD MD MD
Ethiopia 0 0 0 + in 5 years 0 MD MD MD
Georgia + in 3 years 0 0 0 0 + in 9 years + in 8 years 0
Guatemala 0 0 0 0 0 0 + in 7 years 0
Guinea Biss. 0 0 0 0 0 MD MD + in 3 years
Haiti 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Iran
in 6 years
in 3 years 0
in 6 years
in 6 years MD MD MD
Iraq + in 4 years + in 10 years 0 0 0 + in 6 years + in 6 years 0
Jordan + in 11 years + in 20 years 0 + in 12 years + in 22 years MD MD MD
The Rule of Law in Post-Conflict Settings

Kenya + in 6 years + in 7 years + in 7 years 0 0 MD MD MD

Laos + in 14 years + in 4 years
in 3 years + in 13 years 0 MD MD MD
Lebanon 0 0 MD + in 12 years 0 MD MD MD
Mali 0 0 0 0 0 0 + in 5 years + in 6 years
Moldova 0 0 + in 2 years 0 0 MD MD MD
Morocco 0 0 0 0 0 MD MD MD
Mozambiqu 0 + in 1 year 0 0 0 MD MD MD
Myanmar 0 0 0 0 0
in 6 years
in 5 years 0
Namibia + in 13 years + in 3 years 0 + in 4 years 0 MD MD MD
Nicaragua 0 0 + in 1 year 0 + in 2 years MD MD MD

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 Appendix 2(Continued)

Civil Liberties, Political Executive Executive Judicial Independence, Corruption, Rule of Law, Property,
Country Freedom House (FH) Rights, FH Constraints, Polity Constraints, Henisz Henisz WB WB Heritage Foundation

Nigeria + in 2 years 0 + in 15 years + in 12 years 0 MD MD MD

Oman + in 17 years +2 years +12 years 0 0 MD MD MD
Pakistan 0 0 0 0 0 + in 3 years 0 0
Papua N.G. 0
in 2 years 0 0 0
in 4 years
in 1 year 0
Peru + in 1 year + in 6 years 0 0 0 + in 6 years + in 6 years + in 4 years
Rwanda + in 4 years + in 6 years + in 1 year 0 + in 7 years 0 0 0
Senegal + in 4 years + in 2 years + in 2 years 0 0 0 0 0
South Africa 0 + in 1 year 0 0 0 + in 5 years 0 0
Syria + in 21 years + in 4 years 0 + in 17 years + in 16 years MD MD MD
Tajikistan 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Thailand + in 1 year 0 + in 7 years 0 + in 3 years MD MD MD
Turkey + in 6 years 0 0 0 0 + in 2 years + in 2 years In 3 years
Vietnam + in 23 years 0 0 + in 16 years + in 15 years MD MD MD
Yemen 0 0 0 0 0
in 5 years + in 11 years 0
Yemen PR 0 0 +8 years 0 0 MD MD MD
Yugoslavia 0 0 MD 0 0 + In 2 years + in 2 years 0
Zimbabwe
in 12 years
in 13 years 0
in 14 years 0 MD MD MD
(Note. + and
signify a statistically significant improvement or deterioration in the indicated rule-of-law variable as well as the number of post-conflict years it took for this result. MD means there was a gap in the data or
insufficient data to conduct the analysis. To the left of the bold vertical line are indicators with temporal coverage ranging back to the 1940s in some cases. To the right of the bold vertical line are indicators with limited
temporal coverage from the mid 1990s onward).
Stephan Haggard and Lydia Tiede
417

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