IN FROM THE COLD: Institutions and Causal Inference in Postcommunist Studies

■ Abstract Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standing concerns in political science. This is in itself a sign that after years on the periphery of political science prior to 1989, the study of politics and economics in postcommunist Eurasia has come in from the cold. terms (likely search terms) for your article besides the words in its title. You may add 2 more.**] INTRODUCTION Social scientists witnessed the postcommunist transformation with (to borrow a phrase) the audacity to hope that the introduction of sweeping economic and political reforms across more than 25 postcommunist countries would enlighten scholars and policymakers about relations between institutions and many outcomes of interest. Does democracy promote economic and institutional reform? Do electoral rules shape the formation of political parties? Under what conditions do private property rights emerge? Do democratic institutions strengthen individual tolerance of other groups? civicness? [**AU: Civic-52 mindedness? Civic spirit?**] Under what conditions do institutional legacies influence national identity? These central questions of social science were high on the list of research topics in the early 1990s, and scholars of postcommunism aimed not only to answer them but also to integrate the study of postcommunism with disciplinary concerns. During the late-Soviet era, much of the most interesting research on communism had found little resonance in political science. In answering these questions, scholars of postcommunism faced challenges common to institutional analysis in political science more generally. For example, students of postcommunism struggled to make causal inferences about the impact of institutions on outcomes due to endogeneity problems. Ideally, discerning the nature of causation between institutions and outcomes requires that one variable be held exogenously constant while the other takes random values across the units under observation. Unfortunately for scholars, institutions were not randomly assigned to countries at the start of the transformation, so it was likely that institutions and outcomes were driven by the same factors. Exogenously creating a democratic Estonia and an autocratic Latvia and examining each country " s choice of economic reform would have been of great benefit for scholars, if not such a great deal for Latvians. Endogeneity …