Head of a Civilized Nation
Organizing a Kingdom
Charles Angelucci, Simone Meraglia & Nico Voigtländer
NBER Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers governing large territories, where administrative power needs to be delegated to local elites. We describe how economic change can motivate rulers to empower different elites and emphasize the interaction between local and nationwide institutions. We show that rising economic potential of towns leads to local administrative power (self-governance) of urban elites. As a result, the ruler summons them to central assemblies in order to ensure effective communication and coordination between self-governing towns and the rest of the realm. This framework can explain the emergence of municipal autonomy and towns’ representation in early modern European parliaments -- a blueprint for Western Europe’s institutional framework that promoted state-formation and economic growth in the centuries to follow. We provide empirical evidence for our core mechanisms and discuss how the model applies to other historical dynamics, and to alternative organizational settings.
Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism
Daniel Meierrieks & Daniel Auer
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. We find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. We also show that corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods and undermines counter-terrorism capacity. Thus, our empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a game-theoretical representation of terrorism, according to which corruption makes terrorism relatively more attractive compared to peaceful contestation, while also decreasing the costs of organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks.
Kim Il-sung in the Soviet Army, 1940–1945: His Experience and Its Future Impact on the North Korean State and Armed Forces
Konstantin Tertitski & Fyodor Tertitskiy
Journal of Cold War Studies, Spring 2024, Pages 4-25
Abstract:
This article traces the origins of North Korea's militarized, repressive political system. It shows that the policies of the country's founder, Kim Il-sung, were heavily influenced by his personal experience in the USSR, or, more precisely, in the Soviet armed forces in the early 1940s. This factor has been largely overlooked by the academic community up to now. Drawing on a wealth of new sources in Chinese, Korean, and Russian, the article discusses how Kim's service as a Soviet military officer shaped his worldview and approach to governing North Korea. Through a multifaceted analysis of the North Korean military, the article reveals how its size, doctrine, economic role, and political education system were all influenced by Kim's experiences and those of his fellow soldiers in the USSR's Red Army. This insight has broader implications for understanding North Korean civilian society. By shedding light on the formative experiences that shaped Kim's approach to governance, the article offers a new lens through which to view the country's political and social structures.
How Erroneous Beliefs Trigger Authoritarian Collapse: The Case of Tunisia, January 14, 2011
Anne Wolf
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why was the longtime Tunisian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali ousted on January 14, 2011? Prevailing theories focus on popular mobilization, grievances, and the role of the army to explain the collapse of the authoritarian regime. I evaluate these arguments in light of new empirical evidence, which shows that they are insufficient to explain Ben Ali’s ousting. Analyzing key decisional moments and counterfactual scenarios, I propose that the regime collapsed because of a set of erroneous beliefs, which flourished amid the contingent revolutionary context. Erroneous beliefs are endogenous to highly contingent revolutionary periods and a potential contingency themselves in that they can change collective outcomes. This study shows how the microanalysis of events can furnish new insights into highly impactful events in history -- the collapse of the Ben Ali regime gave rise to the wider Arab Uprisings -- and topics of key concern to scholars of contentious politics, authoritarianism, and democratization.
Democracy Doesn't Always Happen Over Night: Regime Change in Stages and Economic Growth
Vanessa Boese-Schlosser & Markus Eberhardt
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
How substantial are the economic benefits from democratic regime change? We argue that democratisation is often not a discrete event but a two-stage process: autocracies enter into ‘episodes’ of political liberalisation which eventually culminate in regime change or not. To account for this chronology and the implicit counterfactual groups, we introduce a repeated-treatment difference-in-difference implementation capturing non-parallel trends and selection into treatment. We find that modelling regime change in two stages rather than a single event yields stronger long-run growth effects. Among democratizers, experiencing repeated episodes without regime change reduces growth in democracy whereas length of episode does not.
How Budgets Shape Power Sharing in Autocracies
Darin Christensen & Michael Gibilisco
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, January 2024, Pages 53-90
Abstract:
How do government budgets affect autocrats' incentives to share or consolidate power? We estimate a dynamic decision problem in which autocrats build their ruling coalitions to maintain power and maximize rents amid fluctuating budgets. Even for unconstrained autocrats, we find that ousting (potential) rivals is costly and, when budgets are tight, reduces their short-term survival prospects. Despite these upfront costs, exclusion has dynamic benefits during periods of prolonged budget contraction: autocrats reduce patronage obligations that they may struggle to afford on a tighter budget, which increases their long-term survival chances and share of spoils. By contrast, budget upswings have lasting positive effects on power sharing. Our counterfactuals indicate that budget shocks comparable to those generated by recent commodity booms increase the probability of inclusive ruling coalitions by over 10 percentage points over 25 years. Case studies of Sudan and Liberia indicate that our model and results describe the tradeoffs and survival strategies of real-world autocrats.
National Identity and Democracy Ratings
Sarah Sunn Bush & Melina Platas
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Global performance indicators, such as democracy ratings, are influential tools of global governance and can have a direct bearing on foreign policy, aid, and investment. Many of these indicators rely on expert assessments. Although expert assessments are generally understood to be objective, this article suggests raters’ identities may shape their assessments. It specifically examines how national identity shapes democracy ratings. Two data sources -- an original survey of experts on Uganda and the Varieties of Democracy Institute -- reveal significant differences in the ratings provided by national and non-national experts. In most cases, ratings by nationals are more positive. This article explores three potential reasons for the difference, finding some support for each: national differences in information access and consumption, national differences in conceptions of democracy, and in-group–out-group bias. The findings have implications for our understanding of global performance indicators, which are overwhelmingly a product of Global North organizations.