State History and State Fragility: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the association between the length of experience with statehood, or state history, on the likelihood of state fragility. The argument is that the accumulation of knowledge by state personnel, and the build up of experience within state institutions, allows the state to avoid the exposure to recurrent crises, which is considered a symptom of weakness. The paper focuses on sub-Saharan African countries and uses Probit estimation techniques. The analysis shows that state history has a negative and statistically significant effect on the state fragility index. This result is robust after the inclusion of a variety of economic, political, institutional and historical variables. We also use extreme fragility as our dependent variable. The Probit and Relogit estimations also show a statistically significant negative effect of state history on extreme fragility. This is the case even after the inclusion of control variable