Social Science Statistics Blog

A basic goal of political science is to understand the effects of political institutions on war and peace. Yet the impact of United Nations peacebuilding following civil war remains very much in doubt following King and Zeng (2006), which found that prior conclusions about these causal effects (Doyle and Sambanis 2000) had been based more on indefensible modeling assumptions than evidence. This paper revisits the Doyle and Sambanis causal questions and answers them using new matching-based methods that address issues raised by King and Zeng. The methods are validated for the Doyle and Sambanis data via their application to a dataset with similar features for which the correct answer is known. These new methods do not require assumptions that plagued prior work and are broadly applicable to important inferential problems in political science and beyond. When the methods are applied to the Doyle and Sambanis data, there is a preponderance of evidence to suggest that UN peacebuilding has a positive effect on peace and democracy in the aftermath of civil war.