Replication data for: Soldiers and Scholars: Evaluating the Effects of Education on Joining the Fight in Civil War

Using survey results from post-war Sierra Leone, HW study why individuals join a fighting faction. HW found support for three theories of participation: individual or group grievances, individual selective incentives, and community pressure.

In this paper, we replicate HW's findings, but after dealing with problems of model dependence and a surplus of proposed causal variables, we find more nuanced effects of greivance mechanims. We demonstrate that education and mud walls, a proxy for poverty, have different effects on joining, depending on the faction. Building on HW's study, these results bring us closer to identifying the causal mechanisms at work in determining who joins the fight in civil war.