King for a day
Learning to Love Democracy: Electoral Accountability and the Success of Democracy
Milan Svolik
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article explains why dissatisfaction with the performance of individual politicians in new democracies often turns into disillusionment with democracy as a political system. The demands on elections as an instrument of political accountability are much greater in new than established democracies: politicians have yet to form reputations, a condition that facilitates the entry into politics of undesirable candidates who view this period as their "one-time opportunity to get rich." After a repeatedly disappointing government performance, voters may rationally conclude that "all politicians are crooks" and stop discriminating among them, to which all politicians rationally respond by "acting like crooks," even if most may be willing to perform well in office if given appropriate incentives. Such an expectation-driven failure of accountability, which I call the "trap of pessimistic expectations," may precipitate the breakdown of democracy. Once politicians establish reputations for good performance, however, these act as barriers to the entry into politics of low-quality politicians. The resulting improvement in government performance reinforces voters' belief that democracy can deliver accountability, a process that I associate with democratic consolidation. These arguments provide theoretical microfoundations for several prominent empirical associations between the economic performance of new democracies, public attitudes toward democracy, and democratic stability.
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Democratic Values and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from a National Survey of Pakistan
Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra & Jacob Shapiro
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
A long-standing research tradition on political culture argues that greater support for core liberal values leads to a rejection of destructive political activities and reduced support for violent politics. In this vein, many contemporary analysts of security policy contend that a lack of democratic values in the Middle East promotes the development of violent political organizations. Unfortunately, there have been few direct tests of the hypothesis that an individual's rejection of democratic values correlates with support for militant groups. We conduct such a test in Pakistan using an original 6,000-person provincially representative survey. We find that strong supporters of democratic values are actually more supportive of militant groups and that this relationship is strongest among those who believe that Muslim rights and sovereignty are being violated in Kashmir. This is consistent with the context of Pakistani politics, where many militant groups use the principle of azadi (i.e., freedom and self-determination) to justify their actions. These results challenge the conventional wisdom about the roots of militancy and underscore the importance of understanding how local context mediates the influence of civic culture on political stability and violence.
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Stephen Haber
Stanford Working Paper, August 2012
Abstract:
Why are some societies characterized by enduring democracy, while other societies are either persistently autocratic or experiment with democracy but then quickly fall back into autocracy? I find that there is a systematic, non-linear relationship between rainfall levels and regime types such that such that stable democracies overwhelmingly cluster in a band of moderate rainfall (540 to 1200 mm of precipitation per year), while the world's most persistent autocracies cluster in arid environments and rain-forests. This relationship is robust to controls for the resource curse, as well as to controls for ethno-linguistic fractionalization, the percent of the population that is Muslim, disease environment, and colonial heritage. I advance a theory to explain this relationship, focusing on differences in the biological and technological characteristics of the crops that can be grown in different precipitation environments. Variance in the biological and technological characteristics of crops generated different incentives for producers, giving rise to variance in social structures and fundamental institutions, most particularly those related to income distribution, property rights, and investments in human capital. I test the theory against a unique cross-country dataset, a comparison of democracies and autocracies in antiquity, and a natural experiment.
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The Emergence of Political Accountability
Chris Bidner & Patrick Francois
Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
When and how do democratic institutions deliver accountable government? In addressing this broad question, we focus on the role played by political norms - specifically, the extent to which leaders abuse office for personal gain, and the extent to which citizens punish such transgressions. We show how qualitatively distinct political norms can coexist because of a dynamic complementarity, in which citizens' willingness to punish transgressions is raised when they expect such punishments to be used in the future. We seek to understand the emergence of accountability by analysing transitions between norms. To do so, we extend the analysis to include the possibility that, at certain times, a segment of voters are (behaviourally) intolerant of transgressions. Our mechanism highlights the role of leaders, offering an account of how their actions can instigate enduring change, within a fixed set of formal institutions, by disrupting prevailing political norms. We show how such changes do not depend on 'sun spots' to trigger coordination, and are asymmetric in effect - a series of good leaders can (and eventually will) improve norms, whereas bad leaders cannot damage them.
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Fredrik Jansson, Patrik Lindenfors & Mikael Sandberg
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent 'democratic revolutions' in Islamic countries call for a re-consideration of transitions to and from democracy. Transitions to democracy have often been considered the outcome of socio-economic modernization and therefore slow and incremental processes. But as a recent study has made clear, in the last century, transitions to democracy have mainly occurred through rapid leaps rather than slow and incremental steps. Here, we therefore apply an innovation and systems perspective and consider transitions to democracy as processes of institutional, and therefore systemic, innovation adoption. We show that transitions to democracy starting before 1900 lasted for an average of 50 years and a median of 56 years, while transitions originating later took an average of 4.6 years and a median of 1.7 years. However, our results indicate that the survival time of democratic regimes is longer in cases where the transition periods have also been longer, suggesting that patience paid in previous democratizations. We identify a critical 'consolidation-preparing' transition period of 12 years. Our results also show that in cases where the transitions have not been made directly from autocracy to democracy, there are no main institutional paths towards democracy. Instead, democracy seems reachable from a variety of directions. This is in line with the analogy of diffusion of innovations at the nation systems level, for which assumptions are that potential adopter systems may vary in susceptibility over time. The adoption of the institutions of democracy therefore corresponds to the adoption of a new political communications standard for a nation, in this case the innovation of involving in principle all adult citizens on an equal basis.
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The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787-1828
Donald Ratcliffe
Journal of the Early Republic, Summer 2013, Pages 219-254
Abstract:
Historians and political scientists continue to emphasize the connection between the expansion of the suffrage to almost all adult white males and Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency in 1828. That interpretation has the unfortunate effect of preventing general appreciation of what has been clear to specialists for decades, that the suffrage had significantly expanded and the United States become in many ways a functioning democracy long before 1815. Even before the Revolution at least 60 percent of adult white males had been able to vote, and that figure had expanded significantly by 1787. The traditional belief that voting must be restricted to those with a "stake in society" still persisted, but increasingly the stake was measured less by the freehold ownership of landed property than by measures of civic involvement such as taxpaying, militia service, and evidences of social contribution. Qualifications defined by wealth were gradually undermined by inflation, and restrictions on voting proved difficult to enforce in practice. After partisan differences became inflamed in the 1790s, turnouts rose to unprecedented - and sometimes unrepeated - levels. In the end this pressure from below created a situation in which even conservatives thought that honest elections required the legal recognition of what was in fact happening at the polls. There was no constitutional revolution in the 1820s, except in New York, and the growing political agitation that resulted in Jackson's election was nothing more than the application to presidential elections of what had become commonplace in many states before 1815.
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The Amplification Effect: Foreign Aid's Impact on Political Institutions
Nabamita Dutta, Peter Leeson & Claudia Williamson
Kyklos, May 2013, Pages 208-228
Abstract:
How does foreign aid affect recipient countries' political institutions? Two competing hypotheses offer contradictory predictions. The first sees aid, when delivered correctly, as an important means of making dictatorial recipient countries more democratic. The second sees aid as a corrosive force on recipient countries' political institutions that makes them more dictatorial. This paper offers a third hypothesis about how aid affects recipients' political institutions that we call the "amplification effect." We argue that foreign aid has neither the power to make dictatorships more democratic nor to make democracies more dictatorial. It only amplifies recipients' existing political institutions. We investigate this hypothesis using panel data for 124 countries between 1960 and 2009. Our findings support the amplification effect. Aid strengthens democracy in already democratic countries and dictatorship in already dictatorial regimes.
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Technology and Collective Action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage on Political Violence in Africa
Jan Pierskalla & Florian Hollenbach
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The spread of cell phone technology across Africa has transforming effects on the economic and political sphere of the continent. In this paper, we investigate the impact of cell phone technology on violent collective action. We contend that the availability of cell phones as a communication technology allows political groups to overcome collective action problems more easily and improve in-group cooperation, and coordination. Utilizing novel, spatially disaggregated data on cell phone coverage and the location of organized violent events in Africa, we are able to show that the availability of cell phone coverage significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict. Our findings hold across numerous different model specifications and robustness checks, including cross-sectional models, instrumental variable techniques, and panel data methods.
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Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions?
James Fenske
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The land abundance view of African history uses sparse population to explain pre-colonial land tenure and slavery. I document the geographic forcing variables that predict land rights, slavery, and population density in a cross section of global societies. I discuss whether these correlations support theories of land rights and slavery, including the land abundance view. I show that pre-colonial institutions predict institutional outcomes in Africa in the present, including land transactions, polygamy, and public goods. Pre-colonial institutions have effects above those of geography. The colonial reversal of fortune did not erase their influence.
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Do banking crises cause terrorism?
Thomas Gries & Daniel Meierrieks
Economics Letters, June 2013, Pages 321-324
Abstract:
We analyze the effect of banking crises on terrorist activity for 146 countries between 1972 and 2006. We show that banking crises lead to a subsequent increase in terrorism. This effect is only relevant in less developed economies.
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Demography and democracy: The impact of youth cohort size on democratic stability in the world
Hannes Weber
Democratization, March/April 2013, Pages 335-357
Abstract:
The traditional explanations for the survival of democratic systems mostly include economic and cultural variables. Only rarely has attention been given to the age structure of a society. This article introduces a hypothesis involving the 'youth bulge' concept popular in conflict studies. It is hypothesized that democratic countries with proportionally large male youth cohorts are more likely to become dictatorships than societies with a smaller share of young men. A causal link between demography and democracy is assumed to exist because young men are the protagonists of virtually all violent political action as well as political extremism with a potential to threaten democracy. Strong evidence supporting the hypothesis is found using data for 110 countries in the period from 1972-2009.
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Iris Fruchter-Ronen
Middle Eastern Studies, March/April 2013, Pages 280-295
Abstract:
This article will discuss the school textbooks in history and civic in the elementary and secondary schools of Jordan between 1964 and 1994 and will show that the changes in the narrative manifested in the school textbooks in the course of these years were influenced by the political, ideological and national needs of Jordanian regime in this period and especially in the light of the Palestinian component in the Jordanian society that presented not only a national-ideological, but also a physical and existential challenge to the integrity of the kingdom. The article will show how, in view of the developments in the Palestinian arena, the school textbooks reflect an attempt on part of the Jordanian regime to forge a national Arab and Jordanian-Palestinian identity up to the end of the 1960s whereas since the beginning of the 1970s, the emphasis is placed on a separate Jordanian territorial identity.
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Credit rating agencies and elections in emerging democracies: Guardians of fiscal discipline?
Marek Hanusch & Paul Vaaler
Economics Letters, June 2013, Pages 251-254
Abstract:
Analyses of budget balances in 18 emerging presidential democracies observed prior to the financial crisis of 2008-2009 show that credit rating agencies induce fiscal discipline in election years, thus reducing incentives for governments to borrow opportunistically for short-term electoral gain.
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Providing quality infrastructure in rural villages: The case of rural roads in China
Ho Lun Wong et al.
Journal of Development Economics, July 2013, Pages 262-274
Abstract:
When seeking to build high quality and cost-effective infrastructure in rural villages, a fundamental question is: Who is better at doing so? Should the village leadership or a government agency above the village finance and/or manage the construction of the infrastructure project? To answer this question, we surveyed all rural road projects in 101 villages in rural China between 2003 and 2007 and measured the quality and per kilometer cost of each road. According to our analysis, road quality was higher when more of the project funds came from the government agency above. Moreover, projects had lower cost per kilometer when the village leaders managed the road construction. Overall, our findings suggest that to build high quality and cost-effective rural roads village leaders and government agencies should collaborate and each specialize in a specific project role.
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A political economy of human rights: Oil, natural gas, and state incentives to repress
Jacqueline DeMeritt & Joseph Young
Conflict Management and Peace Science, April 2013, Pages 99-120
Abstract:
Oil and other natural resources are linked to many undesirable outcomes, such as civil war, autocracy and lack of economic development. Using a state-centered framework for revenue extraction, we identify why oil should also be linked to another undesirable effect: repression. We argue that repression is less costly where states do not rely on their citizenry for generating revenue, so that these states are more likely than others to use indiscriminate violations of personal integrity rights as a policy tool. We test this argument using a cross-national database with a variety of indicators of oil and fuel rents and personal integrity violations. Across all specifications and different indicators, we find a substantive and significant relationship between a state relying on oil and the violation of personal integrity rights.
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Yechiel Klar, Noa Schori-Eyal & Yonat Klar
Journal of Social Issues, March 2013, Pages 125-143
Abstract:
For the vast majority of contemporary Israelis, the Holocaust is an acquired memory. However, over the years its presence has not diminished but rather is on the rise. We describe how perceptions of the Holocaust have changed from "what Israeliness is not" in the 1940s and 1950s to a core element in Israeli identity. Inspired by Bauer, we present four different and sometimes incompatible voices related to the Holocaust that greatly affect the Israeli society. They are: Never be a passive victim; never forsake your brothers; never be passive bystander; and never be a perpetrator. Experimental evidence related to these voices is also described.
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Marriage Networks, Nepotism and Labor Market Outcomes in China
Shing-Yi Wang
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper considers the role of marriage in improving labor market outcomes through the expansion of an individuals' networks. I focus on the impact of the relationship with the father-in-law on a young man's career using panel data from China. The identification strategy isolates the network effects related to a man's father-in-law by examining the post-marriage death of a father-in-law. The estimates suggest that the loss of the father-in-law translates into a decrease in a man's earnings by 7%.
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Why do poor countries suffer costly conflict? Unpacking per capita income and the onset of civil war
Tor Georg Jakobsen, Indra De Soysa & Jo Jakobsen
Conflict Management and Peace Science, April 2013, Pages 140-160
Abstract:
Empirical studies on the causes of civil war robustly show that poor countries are more likely to suffer civil war than rich ones. However, the interpretations of this finding differ. The literature proposes three different causal mechanisms: (1) poverty leads to grievances; (2) income proxies the opportunity-cost of rebelling; and (3) income proxies state capacity. Using factor analysis, logistic modeling and multiple imputation, we test which of the three possible explanations can best explain the link between poverty and conflict. We find per capita income to belong to a wealth/poverty dimension, and to have little in common with "pure" measures of grievance and state capacity. Thus our findings support the opportunity-cost argument. The wealth dimension is also shown to be the most important underlying cause of civil war.