Friends, Romans, countrymen
Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France
Noel Johnson & Mark Koyama
Journal of Law and Economics, February 2014, Pages 77-112
Abstract:
How is rule of law established? We address this question by exploring the effect of increases in fiscal capacity on the establishment of well-enforced, formal, legal standards in a preindustrial economy. Between 1550 and 1700, there were over 2,000 witch trials in France. Prosecuting a witch required local judges to significantly deviate from formal rules of evidence. Hence, we exploit the significant variation across time and space in witch trials and fiscal capacity across French regions between 1550 and 1700 to show that increases in fiscal capacity were associated with increased adherence to the formal rule of law. As fiscal capacity increased, local judges increasingly upheld de jure rules, and the frequency of witch trials declined.
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War and democracy in ancient Greece
Nicholas Kyriazis & Xenophon Paparrigopoulos
European Journal of Law and Economics, August 2014, Pages 163-183
Abstract:
In the present paper we analyse some of the preconditions for the emergence of democracy in Ancient Greece. For democracy to emerge in Ancient Greece a combination of several enabling factors proved decisive: the development of new military tactic, the phalanx, marked by the appearance of a new type of heavy infantry warrior, the hoplite, who owned individually some property, i.e. land, sufficient to permit him to finance his weaponry and a city-state culture. We describe the emergence of this new type of warrior, link this emergence to the establishment of individual property rights and show how this brought about a military revolution, exemplified in a new tactical formation, the phalanx. We then proceed by showing how the attitudes and learning processes made necessary by this new type of warfare were transformed in the civic values and virtues that shaped democratic institutions. Our thesis can thus be briefly termed as the “military cum city-state” explanation of democracy.
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Pavel Osinsky & Jari Eloranta
Sociological Forum, June 2014, Pages 318–341
Abstract:
According to classic interpretations of the communist revolutions, political mobilization of peasantry was critical for the success of the revolutionary forces. This article, which reexamines the experience of civil wars in Russia, Finland, Spain, and China, argues that peasants’ contribution to the revolutions in Russia and later in China became possible under two historical conditions: breakdown of state authorities during the mass mobilization wars and existence of an unresolved agrarian problem in the countryside. Neither of these conditions alone, as the experience of other countries has shown, was sufficient for a success of the revolutionaries. The Spanish civil war of 1936–1939, for instance, was not preceded by a major international war. Because institutions of the traditional social order had not been undermined by war, Franco was able to defeat the Popular Front government, despite the peasants’ support of the revolution. In the Finnish civil war of 1918, which broke out in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution, state institutions did not collapse completely and the peasantry was divided in their responses to the revolution; the rural smallholders, for example, aligned with the Mannerheim's White army, not with the urban revolutionaries.
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Thomas Curtis
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 2014, Pages 474–626
Abstract:
Why did the colonies of North America rebel against England in 1775? More than ideas of political freedom were at stake. It is unlikely that the colonists would have demanded independence if powerful land speculators, merchants, and urban artisans had not joined forces to protect their economic interests. England had levied taxes on the colonies, and the colonists had successfully overturned those measures. Taxation was a superficial problem. But in 1773, when England imposed a commercial monopoly on tea sales, and in 1774, when it cut off settlement in western lands, the colonists saw no choice but to rebel and create their own nation. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and other wealthy Virginians who led the American Revolution stood to lose their huge investment in potential land sales if England maintained control of the colonies.
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Nico Voigtlaender & Hans-Joachim Voth
NBER Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
Can infrastructure investment win “hearts and minds”? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship – the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment, and was widely used for propaganda purposes. We examine its role in increasing support for the NS regime by analyzing new data on motorway construction and the 1934 plebiscite, which gave Hitler greater powers as head of state. Our results suggest that road building was highly effective, reducing opposition to the nascent Nazi regime.
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Economic sanctions and official ethnic discrimination in target countries, 1950–2003
Dursun Peksen
Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conventional studies on the consequences of sanctions tend to focus on the target society as a whole without specifying how foreign economic pressures might affect the well-being of vulnerable groups within target countries – the same groups who often disproportionately bear the burden of sanctions. This study explores the extent to which sanctions increase the likelihood of discriminatory government practices against one of the globally most vulnerable groups, ethnic groups. It is argued that sanctions contribute to the rise of official ethnic-based economic and political discrimination through contracting the economy and creating incentives for the target government to employ ethnic-based discriminatory policies. Using data on over 900 ethnic groups from 1950 to 2003, the results lend support for the theoretical claim that sanctions prompt the government to pursue ethnic-based discriminatory economic and political practices in multiethnic countries. The findings also indicate that multilateral sanctions are likely to be more harmful to the well-being of ethnic groups than sanctions levied by individual countries. Further, the negative effect of comprehensive sanctions appears to be greater than that of sanctions with moderate and limited impact on the target economy. The regime type of the target state, on the other hand, appears to have a significant role only in conditioning the hypothesized effect of sanctions on economic discrimination. Overall, this study’s focus on a vulnerable segment of the target society – ethnic groups – offers a greater understanding of the consequences of sanctions. It also provides additional insight as to how, in multiethnic countries, political elites might domestically respond to external pressures to retain power.
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Bases, Bullets and Ballots: the Effect of U.S. Military Aid on Political Conflict in Colombia
Oeindrila Dube & Suresh Naidu
NBER Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
Does foreign military assistance strengthen or further weaken fragile states facing internal conflict? Aid may strengthen the state by bolstering its repressive capacity vis-à-vis armed non-state actors, or weaken it if resources are diverted to these very groups. We examine how U.S. military aid affects political violence in Colombia. We exploit the allocation of U.S. military aid to Colombian military bases, and compare how aid affects municipalities with and without bases. We use an instrument based on worldwide increases in U.S. military aid (excluding Latin America). We find that U.S. military assistance leads to differential increases in attacks by paramilitaries, but has no effect on guerrilla attacks. Aid also results in more paramilitary (but not guerrilla) homicides during election years, particularly in politically competitive municipalities. The findings suggest that foreign military assistance may strengthen armed non-state actors, undermining domestic political institutions.
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Targeting autocrats: Economic sanctions and regime change
Manuel Oechslin
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
When it comes to international economic sanctions, the most frequent goal is regime change and democratization. Yet, past experiences suggest that such sanctions are often ineffective; moreover, quite paradoxically, targeted regimes tend to respond with policies that amplify the sanctions’ harmful effects. This paper offers a political-economy model which provides an explanation for these observations. An autocratic regime lowers the supply of public goods to reduce private-sector productivity and hence the resources of potential challengers. As a result, sanctions-induced challenges become less likely, thereby buying the regime time to find exile opportunities. If these opportunities turn out to be of low quality, the regime prefers to hold out – and the sanctions fail.
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Mobilization, Repression, and Revolution: Grievances and Opportunities in Contentious Politics
Mehdi Shadmehr
Journal of Politics, July 2014, Pages 621-635
Abstract:
I develop a framework to study the interactions between dissidents and the state that reconciles political-process and grievance-based theories of protests and provides insights into interpreting the conflicting empirical studies that sometimes support one theory and sometimes the other. I show that contrary to the theoretical predictions of the literature, the relationship between the magnitude of grievances (e.g., the level of income inequality or economic hardship) and the likelihood of repression can be nonmonotone, and given some assumptions, is U-shaped. That is, as the magnitude of grievances increases from low to high, the likelihood of repression first decreases and then increases. Indeed, the data suggest a nonmonotone, U-shaped relationship between the level of repression and income inequality. I also discuss the implications for the empirical studies of repression.
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Patrick Francois, Ilia Rainer & Francesco Trebbi
NBER Working Paper, June 2014
Abstract:
We posit the problem of an autocrat who has to allocate access to the executive positions in his inner circle and define the career profile of his own insiders. Statically, granting access to an executive post to a more experienced subordinate increases political returns to the post, but is more threatening to the leader in case of a coup. Dynamically, the leader monitors the capacity of staging a coup by his subordinates, which grows over time, and the incentives of trading a subordinate’s own position for a potential shot at the leadership, which defines the incentives of staging a palace coup for each member of the inner circle. We map these theoretical elements into structurally estimable hazard functions of terminations of cabinet ministers for a panel of postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries. The hazard functions initially increase over time, indicating that most government insiders quickly wear out their welcome, and then drop once the minister is fully entrenched in the current regime. We argue that the survival concerns of the leader in granting access to his inner circle can cover much ground in explaining the widespread lack of competence of African governments and the vast heterogeneity of political performance between and within these regimes.
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The law of the land: Communal conflict and legal authority
Kristine Eck
Journal of Peace Research, July 2014, Pages 441-454
Abstract:
Common notions about the source of communal land conflict in Africa have long explained it as growing out of conditions of environmental scarcity. This article argues instead that the institutional structure of the legal system is central to understanding which countries are prone to experience communal land conflict. When competing customary and modern jurisdictions coexist in countries inhabited by mixed identity groups, the conflicting sources of legal authority lead to insecurity about which source of law will prevail. Because the source of law is contested, conflict parties cannot trust the legal system to predictably adjudicate disputes, which encourages the use of extrajudicial vigilante measures. Using new data on communal violence in West Africa, this argument is examined for the period 1990–2009. The results show that in countries where competing jurisdictions exist, communal land conflict is 200–350% more likely. These findings suggest that researchers should consider the role of legal institutions and processes in relation to social unrest and collective violence.
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Milli Lake
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
In recent years, courts in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) have produced some of the most progressive judicial decisions against perpetrators of gender violence of anywhere in the world. Yet, DR Congo is often described as the archetypal collapsed state. This article uses a case study of domestic courts in Eastern DR Congo to analyze how and why complex functions of domestic governance — such as the production of frequent and high-quality judicial decisions by domestic courts — are able to persist, even flourish, in an area where the state is characterized by extreme fragility and weakness. I argue that, rather than a decoupling of law and practice as previous approaches might predict, state fragility in DR Congo has created openings for domestic and transnational actors to exert direct influence over judicial processes at multiple levels of governance. The involvement of external actors in the domestic authority structures of states has resulted in surprisingly progressive human rights outcomes in certain issue areas. However, the article also documents some of the unintended consequences of human rights developments that occur at the very peripheries of broader state-building projects.
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Do Giant Oilfield Discoveries Fuel Internal Armed Conflicts?
Yu-Hsiang Lei & Guy Michaels
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use new data to examine the effects of giant oilfield discoveries around the world since 1946. On average, these discoveries increase per capita oil production and oil exports by up to 50 percent. But these giant oilfield discoveries also have a dark side: they increase the incidence of internal armed conflict by about 5-8 percentage points. This increased incidence of conflict due to giant oilfield discoveries is especially high for countries that had already experienced armed conflicts or coups in the decade prior to discovery.
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The Effect of Authoritarian Regime Type on Exchange Rate Policy
David Steinberg & Krishan Malhotra
World Politics, July 2014, Pages 491-529
Abstract:
Conventional wisdom holds that autocracies are more likely than democracies to adopt interventionist and protectionist economic policies, including fixed and undervalued exchange rates. This article suggests that this view is only partially correct: nondemocracies are a heterogeneous grouping, and only some types of authoritarian regimes adopt different foreign economic policies from those of their democratic counterparts. Using the example of exchange rate policy, the authors show that foreign economic policy varies across monarchic, military, and civilian dictatorships. More specifically, they hypothesize that monarchies and military regimes are more likely than democracies and civilian dictatorships to maintain fixed exchange rate regimes because the former regimes have smaller “selectorates” than the latter. The authors also expect that monarchies and civilian dictatorships maintain more undervalued exchange rates than democracies and military regimes because the former regimes provide their leaders with greater tenure security than the latter regimes. These hypotheses are evaluated using a time-series–cross-sectional data set of a large sample of developing countries from 1973 to 2006. The statistical results accord with these predictions. These findings indicate that the ways in which democracies engage with the global economy may be less unique than many believe.
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Rajeev Goel & Ummad Mazhar
Public Finance Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using cross-national panel data, Krause and Méndez recently studied whether voters retract support from political candidates who they think are corrupt. Their main finding is that corruption in public office is effectively punished by voters. Given the well-known issues with adequately measuring corruption, this note examines the sensitivity of extant findings to an alternate corruption measure. We fail to find a statistically robust effect of corruption on electoral outcomes.
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Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest
Marc Bellemare
American Journal of Agricultural Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can food prices cause social unrest? Throughout history, riots have frequently broken out, ostensibly as a consequence of high food prices. Using monthly data at the international level, this article studies the impact of food prices – food price levels as well as food price volatility – on social unrest. Because food prices and social unrest are jointly determined, data on natural disasters are used to identify the causal relationship flowing from food price levels to social unrest. Results indicate that for the period 1990–2011, food price increases have led to increases in social unrest, whereas food price volatility has not been associated with increases in social unrest. These results are robust to alternative definitions of social unrest, to using real or nominal prices, to using commodity-specific price indices instead of aggregated price indices, to alternative definitions of the instrumental variable, to alternative definitions of volatility, and to controlling for non-food-related social unrest.
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Claude Berrebi & Jordan Ostwald
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies have identified correlational associations linking terrorism and females’ standing in the labor market. Theories have been proposed to explain these associations. Some concluded that women’s participation in the labor force could be the driver that moves terrorism; others proposed that terrorism motivates the deviations in the labor force. No study has adequately explored causality and the direction of this association. Using a panel data set of 165 countries and terrorism data from 1980 to 2007, we find that terrorist attacks decrease female labor force participation and increase the gender gap between male and female labor force participation. By exploiting variation across countries and time, we are able to identify and quantify these effects; we are also able to address endogeneity concerns by using two novel instrumental variable approaches. The results are statistically significant and robust across a multitude of model specifications.
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Sarah Sunn Bush & Amaney Jamal
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
A pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East since September 11, 2001, has been promoting democracy, with particular emphasis on support for women's representation. Given high levels of anti-Americanism in the region, does foreign pressure for policy reform undermine this project? Evidence from a nationally representative survey experiment in Jordan shows that an American endorsement of women in politics has no average effect on popular support for women's representation. Instead, domestic patterns of support and opposition to autocrats determine citizens' receptivity to policy endorsements, with policy endorsements of foreign-supported reforms polarizing public opinion. Both foreign and domestic endorsements of women in politics depress support among Jordanians who oppose their regime significantly more than among Jordanians who support it.
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Juking the Stats? Authoritarian Information Problems in China
Jeremy Wallace
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economic statistics inform citizens of general conditions, while central leaders use them to evaluate local officials. Are economic data systematically manipulated? After establishing discrepancies in economic data series cross-nationally, this article examines Chinese sub-national growth data. It leverages variation in the likelihood of manipulation over two dimensions, arguing that politically sensitive data are more likely to be manipulated at politically sensitive times. Gross domestic product (GDP) releases generate headlines, while highly correlated electricity production and consumption data are relatively unnoticed. In Chinese provinces, the difference between GDP and electricity growth increases in years with leadership turnover, which is consistent with juking the stats for political reasons. The analysis points to the political role of information and the limits of non-electoral accountability mechanisms in authoritarian regimes.
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“Good Types” in Authoritarian Elections: The Selectoral Connection in Chinese Local Congresses
Melanie Manion
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
A new electoral design for subnational congress elections in China allows me to investigate the informational utility of authoritarian elections. Authoritarian regimes are notoriously bad at solving the moral hazard problem in the voter’s agency relationship with politicians. Borrowing from the literature on political selection, I theorize that authoritarian elections can nonetheless solve the adverse selection problem: Chinese voters can use their electoral power to select “good types,” with personal qualities that signal they will reliably represent local interests. I analyze original data from a survey of 4,071 Chinese local congressmen and women, including voter nominees and communist party nominees. I find that voters do in fact overcome coordination difficulties to nominate and elect “good types.” In contacting politicians about local problems after the elections, however, voters hedge their bets by contacting regime insiders too. At these very local levels, congressional representation by means of political selection co-exists with communist party nominating and veto power in the electoral process.
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Ingroup Bias in Official Behavior: A National Field Experiment in China
Greg Distelhorst & Yue Hou
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Spring 2014, Pages 203-230
Abstract:
Do ingroup biases distort the behavior of public officials? Recent studies detect large ethnic biases in elite political behavior, but their case selection leaves open the possibility that bias obtains under relatively narrow historical and institutional conditions. We clarify these scope conditions by studying ingroup bias in the radically different political, historical, and ethnic environment of contemporary China. In a national field experiment, local officials were 33% less likely to provide assistance to citizens with ethnic Muslim names than to ethnically-unmarked peers. We find evidence consistent with the ingroup bias interpretation of this finding and detect little role for strategic incentives mediating this effect. This result demonstrates that neither legacies of institutionalized racism nor electoral politics are necessary to produce large ingroup biases in official behavior. It also suggests that ethnically motivated distortions to governance are more prevalent than previously documented.
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Takis Pappas & Eoin O’Malley
American Behavioral Scientist, forthcoming
Abstract:
When badly hit by the same global financial and economic crisis in the early 2000s, the Irish and the Greek societies reacted in quite different ways. Whereas Ireland remained largely acquiescent and displayed a high degree of civil compliance, Greeks took massively to the streets using violence and attacking specifically the state and the state personnel, a phenomenon we refer to as “political Luddism.” It is shown that the two countries are quite similar in terms of their economic condition, cultural background, social composition, ideological profiling, and party system dynamics, among other factors. What, then, explains the two countries’ dissimilar reactions to crisis? Through a detailed analysis of the cases, the article offers evidence that the most compelling explanation relates to the varying ability of the Greek and Irish states to continue providing basic public goods and other state-related services to their respective societies.
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Reconsidering Regime Type and Growth: Lies, Dictatorships, and Statistics
Christopher Magee & John Doces
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Some recent papers have concluded that authoritarian regimes have faster economic growth than democracies. These supposed growth benefits of autocracies are estimated using data sets in which growth rates rely heavily on data reported by each government. Governments have incentives to exaggerate their economic growth figures, however, and authoritarian regimes may have fewer limitations than democracies on their ability to do so. This paper argues that growth data submitted to international agencies are overstated by authoritarian regimes compared to democracies. If true, it calls into question the estimated relationship between government type and economic growth found in the literature. To measure the degree to which each government's official growth statistics are overstated, the economic growth rates reported in the World Bank's World Development Indicators are compared to a new measure of economic growth based on satellite imaging of nighttime lights. This comparison reveals whether or not dictators exaggerate their true growth rates and by how much. Annual GDP growth rates are estimated to be overstated by 0.5–1.5 percentage points in the statistics that dictatorships report to the World Bank.
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Government Control of the Media
Scott Gehlbach & Konstantin Sonin
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time. Media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens’ individual best interest; however, the distinction between state and private media is smaller. Large advertising markets reduce media bias in both state and private media but increase the incentive for the government to nationalize private media. Media bias in state and private media markets diverge as governments become more democratic, whereas media bias in democracies and autocracies converge as positive externalities from mobilization increase.
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Luisa Blanco, Jeffrey Nugent & Kelsey O'Connor
Contemporary Economic Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article extends recent analyses linking the alleged oil curse to a broader set of institutions (13 in number) than democracy, the institution that has received the most attention in the literature. It does so using panel data for over 100 countries between 1975 and 2005, wherever possible, and compares the effects obtained with several different measures of both the importance of oil and experience in the industry and of the interactions between them. Most importantly, instead of simply examining the effect of oil and experience in the industry on the contemporary levels of these various institutions, this study focuses on the effects on changes in the various institutional indicators from one decade to another. While not surprisingly our results reveal considerable sensitivity in the effects of oil resources, oil experience, and interactions across different specifications, they also suggest a number of important findings. The most robust of these are the significant negative effects of oil rents on bureaucratic quality and on socioeconomic conditions. We also find that the number of years since peak oil discovery has a positive effect on government stability, but a negative one on bureaucratic quality. When interactions are allowed for, still more negative effects on institutions are identified, at least partially re-enforcing several of the institutional links in the oil curse hypothesis.
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Christopher Blattman & Jeannie Annan
Columbia University Working Paper, May 2014
Abstract:
We evaluate an agricultural training and inputs program for high-risk Liberian men, mainly ex-fighters engaged in illegal resource extraction with opportunities for mercenary work. We show that economic incentives, including increased farm productivity, raised the opportunity cost of illicit work. After 14 months, treated men shifted hours of illicit resource extraction to agriculture by 20%. When a war erupted nearby, they were also less likely to engage in mercenary recruitment. Finally, exogenous variation in expected future capital transfers appears to be a further deterrent to mercenary work. We see no evidence the program affected occupational choice through peers or preferences.
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Pocketbook vs. Sociotropic Corruption Voting
Marko Klašnja, Joshua Tucker & Kevin Deegan-Krause
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The article examines the relationship between corruption and voting behavior by defining two distinct channels: pocketbook corruption voting, i.e. how personal experiences with corruption affect voting behavior; and sociotropic corruption voting, i.e. how perceptions of corruption in society do so. Individual and aggregate data from Slovakia fail to support hypotheses that corruption is an undifferentiated valence issue, that it depends on the presence of a viable anti-corruption party, or that voters tolerate (or even prefer) corruption, and support the hypothesis that the importance of each channel depends on the salience of each source of corruption and that pocketbook corruption voting prevails unless a credible anti-corruption party shifts media coverage of corruption and activates sociotropic corruption voting. Previous studies may have underestimated the prevalence of corruption voting by not accounting for both channels.