Sovereign
How Tyranny Paved the Way to Democracy: The Democratic Transition in Ancient Greece
Robert Fleck & Andrew Hanssen
Journal of Law and Economics, May 2013, Pages 389-416
Abstract:
Considerable scholarly work has examined the transition to democracy. In this paper, we investigate a path to democracy that is very different from that typically described. During the Archaic period (800–500 BCE), many Greek poleis (city-states) replaced aristocracies with a more narrow governing institution — an autocrat known as the tyrant. Yet as classical scholars have noted, many of the poleis where tyrants reigned in the Archaic period became among the broadest democracies in the subsequent Classical period (500–323 BCE). We analyze a data set of ancient Greek political regime types and review the history of the best-known Archaic period tyrants in order to explore why a transitory narrowing of power — Greek tyranny was a transitory institution — can set the stage for democratization. We briefly consider other historical and modern examples. Our paper shows why an understanding of progress toward democracy requires recognizing the potential importance of nonmonotonic transition paths.
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Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany, 1919-33
Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtlaender & Hans-Joachim Voth
NBER Working Paper, July 2013
Abstract:
Social capital – a dense network of associations facilitating cooperation within a community – typically leads to positive political and economic outcomes, as demonstrated by a large literature following Putnam. A growing literature emphasizes the potentially “dark side” of social capital. This paper examines the role of social capital in the downfall of democracy in interwar Germany by analyzing Nazi party entry rates in a cross-section of towns and cities. Before the Nazi Party’s triumphs at the ballot box, it built an extensive organizational structure, becoming a mass movement with nearly a million members by early 1933. We show that dense networks of civic associations such as bowling clubs, animal breeder associations, or choirs facilitated the rise of the Nazi Party. The effects are large: Towns with one standard deviation higher association density saw at least one-third faster growth in the strength of the Nazi Party. IV results based on 19th century measures of social capital reinforce our conclusions. In addition, all types of associations – veteran associations and non-military clubs, “bridging” and “bonding” associations – positively predict NS party entry. These results suggest that social capital in Weimar Germany aided the rise of the Nazi movement that ultimately destroyed Germany’s first democracy.
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Cross-Border Spillover: U.S. Gun Laws and Violence in Mexico
Arindrajit Dube, Oeindrila Dube & Omar García-Ponce
American Political Science Review, August 2013, Pages 397-417
Abstract:
To what extent, and under what conditions, does access to arms fuel violent crime? To answer this question, we exploit a unique natural experiment: the 2004 expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban exerted a spillover on gun supply in Mexican municipios near Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, but not near California, which retained a pre-existing state-level ban. We find first that Mexican municipios located closer to the non-California border states experienced differential increases in homicides, gun-related homicides, and crime gun seizures after 2004. Second, the magnitude of this effect is contingent on political factors related to Mexico's democratic transition. Killings increased disproportionately in municipios where local elections had become more competitive prior to 2004, with the largest differentials emerging in high narco-trafficking areas. Our findings suggest that competition undermined informal agreements between drug cartels and entrenched local governments, highlighting the role of political conditions in mediating the gun-crime relationship.
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Joerg Baten & Christina Mumme
European Journal of Political Economy, December 2013, Pages 56–79
Abstract:
We test for the influence of absolute and relative deprivation – proxied by anthropometric methods – on civil war risk. A comprehensive height data set allows us to go back to 1816 for a global sample. We measure absolute deprivation using human stature and we use height inequality within birth cohorts to measure relative deprivation. We take care that selectivity caused by missing values does not bias the results. We find that relative economic deprivation within populations (i.e., inequality) had a strong and consistent impact on the propensity to start civil wars. By contrast, absolute deprivation was significant in most but not all specifications. We also attend to potential endogeneity through instrumental variables.
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Exogenous Volatility and the Size of Government in Developing Countries
Markus Brückner & Mark Gradstein
Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper presents instrumental variables estimates of the effects of GDP per capita volatility on the size of government. We show that for a panel of 157 countries spanning more than half a century rainfall volatility has a significant positive effect on GDP per capita volatility in countries with above median temperatures. In these countries rainfall volatility has also a significant positive reduced-form effect on the GDP share of government. There is no significant reduced-form effect in the sample of countries with below median temperatures where rainfall volatility has no significant effect on GDP per capita volatility. Using rainfall volatility as an instrumental variable in the sample of countries with above median temperatures yields that greater GDP per capita volatility leads to a significantly higher GDP share of government.
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Pashtunwali – Law for the Lawless, Defense for the Stateless
Bruce Benson & Zafar Siddiqui
International Review of Law and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite a large and growing literature on systems of law without coercive central authority, the overwhelmingly dominant view remains that law, as a public good, must be produced by the state. Defense against attempts to subjugate a community is even more widely viewed as a public good and therefore a necessary function of the state. This case study of the Pashtunwali - the customary law followed by the ethnic Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan and Pakistan – illustrates that both law and community defense can be effectively produced without the institutions of a state. The incentives created under Pashtunwali have provided the Pashtun with a decentralized system for maintaining order within and between the tribes for several centuries without the authority of a coercive state. In addition, they have generated a system of spontaneous decentralized defense that has allowed the Pashtun to retain/regain their independence from the states that have tried to colonize or subjugate them for centuries.
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Governance, Naval Intervention and Piracy in Somalia
Anja Shortland & Sarah Percy
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, August 2013, Pages 275–283
Abstract:
Might criminals in weak states benefit from better governance? We test the relationship between Somali piracy and local business conditions as well as (naval) law enforcement. Anarchy on land is not helpful to pirates, but corruptible governance is. Increasingly effective naval measures in the Gulf of Aden displaced piracy into the Indian Ocean.
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Killing Kony: Leadership Change and Civil War Termination
Michael Tiernay
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is there a relationship between leadership change and the probability of conflict termination in civil war? This article uses an original data set on the leaders of rebel groups combined with existing data on state leaders to determine whether leadership change in states or rebel groups affects the probability that a civil war will end. Three results emerge: (1) when the leader of a rebel group is captured or killed, wars are 398 percent more likely to end, (2) conflicts are less likely to end while rebel groups are being led by their founder, and (3) the leader of a state that presided over the beginning of the conflict is significantly more likely to bring the conflict to an end than a replacement leader. The results are robust to the use of matching techniques and other tests of endogeneity.
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Resource Curse and Power Balance: Evidence from Iran
Kjetil Bjorvatn, Mohammad Reza Farzanegan & Friedrich Schneider
Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, August 2013, Pages 133–158
Abstract:
Empirical research shows that natural resources have a detrimental effect on economic growth, a phenomenon known as the “resource curse”. Competition between influence groups for access to the resource rents, that is, rent-seeking, is often blamed for this curse. In this article, we dig deeper into the link between political competition and the resource curse by studying the case of Iran from 1960 to 2007. We present a theoretical model demonstrating how the effect of rents on the economy depends on the balance of political power. The model shows that an increase in rents may lead to a sharp reduction in income when the distribution of power between influence groups is relatively balanced. The empirical evidence confirms the predictions of the model.
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Benjamin Goldsmith et al.
Journal of Peace Research, July 2013, Pages 437-452
Abstract:
We present what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first published set of annual out-of-sample forecasts of genocide and politicide based on a global dataset. Our goal is to produce a prototype for a real-time model capable of forecasting one year into the future. Building on the current literature, we take several important steps forward. We implement an unconditional two-stage model encompassing both instability and genocide, allowing our sample to be the available global data, rather than using conditional case selection or a case-control approach. We explore factors exhibiting considerable variance over time to improve yearly forecasting performance. And we produce annual lists of at-risk states in a format that should be of use to policymakers seeking to prevent such mass atrocities. Our out-of-sample forecasts for 1988–2003 predict 90.9% of genocide onsets correctly while also predicting 79.2% of non-onset years correctly, an improvement over a previous study using a case-control in-sample approach. We produce 16 annual forecasts based only on previous years’ data, which identify six of 11 cases of genocide/politicide onset within the top 5% of at-risk countries per year. We believe this represents substantial progress towards useful real-time forecasting of such rare events. We conclude by suggesting ways to further enhance predictive performance.
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What Fosters Enduring Peace? An Analysis of Factors Influencing Civil War Resolution
Madeleine Hosli & Anke Hoekstra
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, August 2013, Pages 123–155
Abstract:
In literature on civil war resolution, several factors have been identified that may influence the peace process. In this paper, based on a combination of different datasets and additional information, we explore reasons for the initiation of negotiations and for the shortening of conflict duration based on 82 civil wars that took place between 1944 and 1997. Employing logistic regression, supplemented by graphical explorations, we demonstrate that the existence of a “mutual hurting stalemate” and partial instead of neutral intervention increase the probability that negotiations set in. In addition to this, somewhat counter-intuitively, our analysis shows that a larger number of warring parties – compared to conflicts based on two rival groups – enhance prospects that negotiations are conducted. This may partially be due to the fact that conflicting parties fear they may be excluded from negotiations on a potential settlement and with this, are more ready to engage in the bargaining process. The occurrence of a military stalemate in the course of a conflict, as our analysis based on proportional hazards survival regression demonstrates, shortens war duration. We put forward the idea that partial intervention to support the weaker party can create mutual hurting stalemates, and in this way, contribute to the ending of civil war. Our study partially confirms work in which the ripeness of a conflict or the existence of a mutual hurting stalemate was found to crucially affect prospects for conflict resolution, but also offers new insights into these themes.
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Israeli Approved Textbooks and the 1948 Palestinian Exodus
Rafi Nets-Zehngut
Israel Studies, Fall 2013, Pages 41-68
Abstract:
A country's official memory of a conflict in which it is involved is of great importance. One of the main presenters of that memory is the Ministry of Education, through the history and civics textbooks it approves for use in its educational system. This article explores for the first time the content of Israeli textbooks approved from 1959 through 2004 regarding one of the main events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Did the textbooks present a Zionist narrative regarding the causes of the exodus (willing flight of the Palestinians), or a critical narrative (willing flight accompanied with expulsion)? Methodologically, the article uses content analysis of all the relevant textbooks, as well as interviews with senior staff at the Ministry and other appropriate figures. The research found that this official memory was dramatically transformed from being initially totally Zionist to eventually being totally critical, since 2000. Other aspects of this memory are also explored such as the reasons behind the presentation of these narratives, the external and self-censorship mechanisms that mediate the impact of these reasons, the manifestation and consequences of these mechanisms, as well as the modus operandi of the Ministry.
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Voters versus terrorists: Analyzing the effect of terrorist events on voter turnout
Joseph Robbins, Lance Hunter & Gregg Murray
Journal of Peace Research, July 2013, Pages 495-508
Abstract:
Scholars and policymakers commonly assume terrorism is intended to affect a broader audience beyond the physically targeted victims. Informed by scholarship regarding the effects of heuristics and emotion on political cognition and behavior, we evaluate the impact of terrorism on the broader audience of the electorate as manifested by voter turnout. We hypothesize that increased terrorism is associated with increased voter turnout. In particular, we invoke the Affective Intelligence model and its related findings that emotion plays a key role in individuals’ political cognition and behavior. Following this perspective, we argue that terrorist attacks are threatening and novel political events that induce anxiety in the electorate, which, in turn, leads individuals to scrutinize the political environment more closely and to ascribe greater salience to proximate political events. As a result of this increased concern with the political environment and increased salience of upcoming elections, we expect voter turnout to increase. While conventional explanations of turnout are important, they do not capture the effect of emotions despite other well-known relationships, such as attitudinal responses to international political crises (e.g. the rally-around-the-flag effect). Our cross-national analyses, which include 51 democracies and use two geographically and definitionally distinct datasets, indicate that the positive relationship between terrorism and turnout is non-trivial and robust.
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Yonatan Lupu
International Organization, July 2013, Pages 469-503
Abstract:
Independent domestic courts play important roles in enforcing international human rights agreements, thereby providing a mechanism by which international institutions can affect government policy. Yet this enforcement power is constrained not only by independence but also by the courts' ability to overcome information problems. Domestic courts' enforcement power depends on information in two ways: the costs of producing legally admissible evidence of abuses and the applicable legal standards of proof. When countries ratify international agreements, judicial enforcement can improve government practices when evidence-production costs and standards of proof are low, but not otherwise. With respect to personal integrity rights violations, evidence is especially difficult to obtain, and standards of proof are high, meaning that the courts will not be able to constrain government practices. By contrast, evidence-production costs and standards of proof are lower for other civil rights violations, so courts will be able to prosecute offenders and bring governments into line with their international commitments. Consistent with this theory, I find that commitments to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) have significantly improved governments' respect for the freedoms of speech, association, assembly, and religion. With respect to personal integrity rights, however, I find that commitments to the ICCPR have not improved government practices.
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Autocratic Adaptation: The Strategic Use of Transparency and The Persistence of Election Fraud
Fredrik Sjoberg
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why would an autocrat want, or at least make it appear to want, to reduce election fraud? In recent years, non-democratic rulers have surprisingly begun to embrace fraud-reducing technologies, like web cameras or transparent ballot boxes. The reason for this is found in the relative ease by which one type of fraud can be replaced with another. With the help of new fraud identification techniques, I argue that the installation of web cameras in polling stations changes how fraud is conducted. Web cameras do not reduce fraud, but rather make certain blatant forms of fraud, like ballot box stuffing, more costly. Autocrats then substitute for other types of fraud, such as fabricating vote count outside the view of the cameras, in order to secure electoral victory.
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The dual policy in the dual economy - the political economy of urban bias in dictatorial regimes
Abdulaziz Shifa
Journal of Development Economics, November 2013, Pages 77–85
Abstract:
In many developing countries, public resource allocation is often biased against the rural population. Since a vast majority of the poor live in rural areas, the bias is highlighted as one of the most important institutional factors contributing to poverty. This paper develops a political economy model of urban bias in a dictatorial regime. A novel result of the model is that urban bias can emerge in predominantly agrarian economies even if there is no bias in political power toward urban residents. The empirical evidence from a recently compiled country-level panel dataset on agricultural taxes/subsidies is consistent with the prediction of the model.
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Legal Centralization and the Birth of the Secular State
Noel Johnson & Mark Koyama
Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the relationship between the historical process of legal centralization and increased religious toleration by the state. We develop a model based on the mathematics of mixture distributions which delineates the conditions under which legal centralization raises the costs faced by states of setting a narrow standard of orthodox belief. We compare the results of the model with historical evidence drawn from two important cases in which religious diversity and state centralization collided in France: the Albigensian crusades of the thirteenth century and the rise of Protestant belief in the sixteenth century.
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Tax Farming and the Origins of State Capacity in England and France
Noel Johnson & Mark Koyama
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
How did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? We develop a model that explains (i) why pre-industrial states relied on private individuals to collect taxes; (ii) why after 1600 both England and France moved from competitive methods for collecting revenues to allocating the right to collect taxes to a small group of financiers — an intermediate institution that we call cabal tax farming — and (iii) why this centralization led to investments in fiscal capacity and increased Fiscal standardization. We provide detailed historical evidence that supports our prediction that rulers abandoned the competitive allocation of tax rights in favor of cabal tax farming in order to gain access to inside credit, and that this transition was accompanied by investments in standardization. Finally (iv) we show why this intermediate institution proved to be self-undermining in England, where it was quickly replaced by direct collection, but lasted in France until the French Revolution.
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Democracy as a middle ground: A unified theory of development and political regimes
Anna Larsson Seim & Stephen Parente
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although many of the worst performing countries over the post-World War II period were autocracies, many of the best were likewise autocratic. At the same time, no long-lived autocracy currently is rich whereas every long-lived democracy is. This paper proposes a theory to account for these observations that rests on the ideas that autocrats are heterogeneous and that elites experience lower land rents with industrialization. In a model calibrated to Britain's development, we show that elites democratize society only after the economy has accumulated enough wealth, and that the democratization date depends importantly on the history of rulers and distribution of land.
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Equality of Educational Opportunity and Attitudes toward Income Inequality: Evidence from China
Xiaobo Lü
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Summer 2013, Pages 271-303
Abstract:
A substantial literature in comparative politics and political economy emphasizes the importance of income inequality in redistributive policies and regime transition. I argue that individual perceptions of equal opportunity affect the degree of resentment toward income inequality. Governments can influence perceptions of equal opportunity through the distribution of public goods and services, such as educational opportunity. Employing various empirical strategies, I systematically estimate both the subjective and objective effects of unequal educational opportunity on attitudes toward income inequality. The first set of evidence is based on two survey experiments conducted in China in 2009 and 2012, respectively; the second set on a 2004 China national survey using a quasi-regression discontinuity design as well as propensity score matching analysis. These complementary analyses offer consistent evidence that inequality of educational opportunity increases resentment toward income inequality.
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The Durability of Revolutionary Regimes
Steven Levitsky & Lucan Way
Journal of Democracy, July 2013, Pages 5-17
Abstract:
Authoritarian regimes that have their origins in revolution boast a much higher survival rate than other brands of authoritarianism. What accounts for the durability of these revolutionary regimes (which the authors define — building on the work of Samuel Huntington and Theda Skocpol — as those which emerge out of sustained, ideological, and violent struggle from below, and whose establishment is accompanied by mass mobilization and significant efforts to transform state structures and the existing social order). Four variables emerge as decisive in explaining the durability of revolutionary regimes: The destruction of independent power centers, strong ruling parties, invulnerability to coups, and enhanced coercive capacity.
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Oil, Democracy, and Context: A Meta-Analysis
Anar Ahmadov
Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
A considerable debate precludes drawing conclusions about oil’s effect on democracy. This article challenges this stalemate by significantly expanding the scope of the previous research and using meta-regression analysis to examine the integrated results of extant scholarship. While the results suggest a nontrivial negative association between oil and democracy across the globe, they also indicate a notable variation in this relationship across world regions and institutional contexts. A conditioning effect of institutions may lie more in a broader set of economic and political institutions, less so in previous political regime, but not in institutions associated with British colonial past. Finally, while oil does not seem to impede democracy by retarding two key channels of modernization — income and urbanization — it may have an indirect negative effect on democracy through its adverse impact on education.
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Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City
Silvia Pasquetti
Law & Society Review, September 2013, Pages 461–492
Abstract:
Recent sociolegal scholarship has explored the role of emotions in lawmaking and policymaking on security and crime issues. This article extends this approach to the relationship between law enforcement and affect by addressing the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of long-term emotions, which bind a collective and fuel ethnonational division. An ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This emotional climate is the product of the subterranean ties of Lod Palestinians with the Israeli security agencies as well as their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I embed the initial creation and relative stability of this emotional climate in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. The article concludes with a discussion of how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and by arguing for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.
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Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?
Tom Ginsburg & Mila Versteeg
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
The past few decades have witnessed a sweeping trend toward constitutional review. This development is arguably one of the most important phenomena in late 20th- and early 21st-century government. Yet the trend poses important puzzles of political economy: Why would self-interested governments willingly constrain themselves by constitutional means? What explains the global shift toward judicial supremacy? Though different theories have been proposed, none have been systematically tested against each other using quantitative empirical methods. In this article, we utilize a unique new dataset on constitutional review for 204 countries for the period 1781–2011 to test various theories that explain the adoption of constitutional review. Using a fixed-effects spatial lag model, we find substantial evidence that the adoption of constitutional review is driven by domestic electoral politics. By contrast, we find no general evidence that constitutional review adoption results from ideational factors, federalism, or international norm diffusion.
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Union Density and Political Strikes
Johannes Lindvall
World Politics, July 2013, Pages 539-569
Abstract:
Why do trade unions organize antigovernment strikes in some countries but not in others? This article argues that there is a curvilinear relationship between union density and political strike activity. Political strikes are rare in countries with low union density, since effective protests require a basic level of organizational capacity. They are also rare in countries with high union density, since a government that faces a strong union movement has powerful incentives to adjust its policies in order to avoid open confrontation. But political strikes are relatively common in countries with moderate levels of union density, since it is difficult for governments and unions to find viable compromises when the strength of the unions is not secure. The empirical part of the article estimates the relationship between union density and the likelihood of political strikes in two samples of advanced democracies.
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Ekrem Karakoc
European Political Science Review, July 2013, Pages 197-223
Abstract:
The global increase in inequality raises concerns among scholars and policy-makers. However, limited evidence exists to identify how inequality affects citizens’ behavior. This study explores the effects of economic inequality on participation in civil society associations by testing hypotheses derived from resource and conflict theories. Using a multilevel Poisson model in 18 post-communist countries, this study finds that inequality has a nonlinear effect on civil society. Economic inequality has a drastically demobilizing effect on associational participation in countries with lower income inequality; meanwhile high inequality has a slightly weak mobilizing effect on associational participation. Further tests show that the effect of inequality varies across different socioeconomic groups, but that the poor are most affected.