Spreading democracy
The First Law of Petropolitics
Romain Wacziarg
Economica, October 2012, Pages 641-657
Abstract:
We examine empirically the relationship between crude oil prices and the ebb and flow of democratic institutions, in order to test the hypothesis that high oil prices undermine democracy and sustain autocracy. We use a variety of time series and panel data methods over a wide range of country subsamples and time periods, finding strictly no evidence in favour of this so-called ‘First Law of Petropolitics' (Friedman 2006).
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Democratic Change in the Arab World, Past and Present
Eric Chaney
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2012, Pages 363-414
Abstract:
Will the Arab Spring lead to long-lasting democratic change? To explore this question, I examine the determinants of the Arab world's democratic deficit in 2010. I find that the percentage of a country's landmass that was conquered by Arab armies following the death of the prophet Muhammad statistically accounts for this deficit. Using history as a guide, I hypothesize that this pattern reflects the long-run influence of control structures developed under Islamic empires in the premodern era and find that the available evidence is consistent with this interpretation. I also investigate the determinants of the recent uprisings. Taken in unison, the results cast doubt on claims that the Arab-Israeli conflict or Arab culture or Muslim theology is a systematic obstacle to democratic change in the region and point instead to the legacy of the region's historical institutional framework.
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Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On
Sean Yom & Gregory Gause
Journal of Democracy, October 2012, Pages 74-88
Abstract:
No monarchy fell to revolution in the Arab Spring. What accounts for this monarchical exceptionalism? Analysts have argued that royal autocracies are inherently more resilient than authoritarian republics due to their cultural foundations and institutional structure. By contrast, this paper leverages comparative analysis to offer a different explanation emphasizing deliberate regime strategies made in circumstances of geographic fortuity. The mobilization of cross-cutting coalitions, hydrocarbon wealth, and foreign patronage account for the resilience of monarchical dictatorships in the Middle East. Without these factors, kingships are just as vulnerable to overthrow as any other autocracy - something that history indicates, given the long list of deposed monarchies in the region over the past half-century.
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Comparing British and French Colonial Legacies: A Discontinuity Analysis of Cameroon
Alexander Lee & Kenneth Schultz
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, October 2012, Pages 365-410
Abstract:
Colonial institutions are thought to be an important determinates of post-independence levels of political stability, economic growth, and public goods provision. In particular, many scholars have suggested that British institutional and cultural legacies are more conducive to growth than those of France or other colonizers. Systematic tests of this hypothesis are complicated by unobserved heterogeneity among nations due to variable pre- and post-colonial histories. We focus on the West African nation of Cameroon, which includes regions colonized by both Britain and France, and use the artificial former colonial boundary as a discontinuity within a national demographic survey. We show that rural areas on the British side of discontinuity have higher levels of wealth and local public provision of piped water. Results for urban areas and centrally-provided public goods show no such effect, suggesting that post-independence policies also play a role in shaping outcomes. Though our ability to identify causal mechanisms is limited, the evidence suggests that communities on the British side benefited from a policy of indirect rule and lack of forced labor, which produced more vigorous local institutions.
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Sovereign Debt and Regime Type: Reconsidering the Democratic Advantage
Emily Beaulieu, Gary Cox & Sebastian Saiegh
International Organization, October 2012, Pages 709-738
Abstract:
The literature exploiting historical data generally supports the democratic advantage thesis, which holds that democracies can sell more bonds on better terms than their authoritarian counterparts. However, studies of more recent - and extensive - data sets find that democracies have received no more favorable bond ratings from credit rating agencies than otherwise similar autocracies; and have been no less prone to default. These findings raise the question: where is the democratic advantage? Our answer is that previous assessments of the democratic advantage have typically (1) ignored the democratic advantage in credit access; (2) failed to account for selection effects; and (3) treated GDP per capita as an exogenous variable, ignoring the many arguments that suggest economic development is endogenous to political institutions. We develop an estimator of how regime type affects credit access and credit ratings analogous to the "reservation wage" model of labor supply and treat GDP per capita as an endogenous variable. Our findings indicate that the democratic advantage in the postwar era has two components: first, better access to credit (most autocracies cannot even enter the international bond markets); and second, better ratings, once propensity to enter the market is controlled and GDP per capita is endogenized.
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Challenging Global Neoliberalism? The global political economy of China's capital controls
Mattias Vermeiren & Sacha Dierckx
Third World Quarterly, October 2012, Pages 1647-1668
Abstract:
This article engages with critical ipe scholars who have examined the rise of China and its impact on the neoliberal world order by analysing whether China poses a challenge to the neoliberal norm of free movement of capital. We argue that China's capital control regime is marked by a contradiction between its domestic social relations of production and its global geo-economic ambitions. On one hand, the key raison d'être of China's capital controls is to protect and consolidate an investment-led accumulation regime that redistributes income and wealth from Chinese workers to its state-owned enterprise sector. Dismantling these controls would result in changing social relations of production that would not necessarily benefit Chinese industrial and financial capital. On the other hand, China's accumulation regime has found itself increasingly constrained by the dynamics of US monetary hegemony, making the contestation of US structural monetary power a key global geo-economic ambition of China's ruling elites. In this regard, China would have to challenge the dominance of the US dollar by promoting the international role of the renminbi and developing liquid financial markets. Since it would have to abolish its capital controls in order to achieve this, there is a plain contradiction between its domestic and global objectives. A good understanding of this contradiction is necessary in order to be able to assess whether China will be capable of challenging the neoliberal world order in general and the norm of free movement of capital in particular.
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Concentration and Self-Censorship in Commercial Media
Fabrizio Germano & Martin Meier
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given that over half the revenues of global newspaper publishing come from advertising (80% in the US and 57% in OECD countries, OECD, 2010), we study how media firms internalize the effect of their own coverage on advertisers' sales and hence on their own advertising revenues. We show, within a framework of non-localized, Hotelling-type competition among arbitrary numbers of media firms and outlets, that (i) topics sensitive to advertisers can be underreported by all outlets in the market, (ii) underreporting tends to increase with the concentration of ownership, (iii) adding outlets, while keeping the number of owners fixed, can further increase the bias. We argue that self-censorship can potentially cover a wide range of topics and generate empirically large externalities.
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Income and democracy: Revisiting the evidence
Enrique Moral-Benito & Cristian Bartolucci
Economics Letters, December 2012, Pages 844-847
Abstract:
In an influential paper, Acemoglu et al. (2008) find that the positive correlation between income per capita and the level of democracy across countries vanishes once country-specific effects are accounted for. In this paper, we find evidence of a non-linear effect from income to democracy even after controlling for country-specific effects. In particular, our findings point to the existence of a positive effect only in low-income countries.
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Rule of Law with Chinese Characteristics: The Role of Campaigns in Lawmaking
Sarah Biddulph, Sean Cooney & Ying Zhu
Law & Policy, October 2012, Pages 373-401
Abstract:
China increasingly relies on its legal system to regulate a broad spectrum of social and economic activity. There is, however, widespread failure to observe the law, which periodically leads to social crises and popular unrest. The Chinese state is not, of course, alone in experiencing this, but it responds to enforcement failures in distinctive ways. This article examines one such response. In this article, we explore the role played by the enforcement campaign in the development of the Chinese legal system. We focus on one campaign in particular: the campaign that was waged between 2004 and 2007 to redress the chronic failure to pay wages. Chinese enforcement campaigns are not simply directed at securing greater compliance with existing law. They are integrally linked to cycles of law reform in the PRC. Whilst their main impact is on enforcement, they also have an important role in influencing the drafting of legislation and the interpretation of law. This article documents the impact of this campaign on the production of law: in speeding up the iterative process of lawmaking, interpretation, and implementation, with production of important reforms to existing labour law in 2007 and 2008. It is the strong "planned" nature of the campaign and its emphasis on state leadership of lawmaking and enforcement that continues to shape the development of China's particular version of the "rule of law."
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Jørgen Juel Andersen & Silje Aslaksen
Journal of Development Economics, January 2013, Pages 89-106
Abstract:
Political economy theories on the "natural resource curse" predict that natural resource wealth is a determining factor for the length of time political leaderships remain in office. Whether resource wealth leads to longer or shorter durations in political office depends on the political incentives created by the natural resources, which in turn depend on the types of institutions and natural resource. Exploiting a sample of more than 600 political leadership durations in up to 152 countries, we find that both institutions and resource types matter for the effect that natural resource wealth has on political survival: (i) wealth derived from natural resources affects political survival in intermediate and autocratic, but not in democratic, polities; and (ii) while oil and non-lootable diamonds are associated with positive effects on the duration in political office, minerals are associated with negative duration effects.
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Violence, access, and competition in the market for protection
Douglas Rogers, Adam Smith & Bart Wilson
European Journal of Political Economy, March 2013, Pages 1-17
Abstract:
We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that "peasants" have to violence-empowered "elites". The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites enforce and operate their protective services to peasants, and to observe the degree to which elites engage in wealth-destroying violence in competition amongst each other for wealth-generating peasants. We find that greater access to peasants strikingly increases violence among the elites, but with limited access the elites markedly extract more tribute from the peasants. Our findings are particularly relevant to the discussion of violence in developing countries.
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Padraic Kenney
Comparative Studies in Society and History, October 2012, Pages 863-889
Abstract:
The political prisoner is a figure taken for granted in historical discourse, with the term being used broadly to describe any individual held in captivity for oppositional activities. This article argues for understanding the political prisoner, for whom prison becomes a vehicle of politics, as the product of modern states and political movements. The earlier practices of the "imprisoned political," for whom prison was primarily an obstacle to politics, gave way to prisoners who used the category creatively against the regimes that imprisoned them. Using the cases of Polish socialists in the Russian Empire, Fenians in Ireland, suffragettes in Britain, and satyagrahi in British South Africa, this article explains how both regimes and their prisoners developed common practices and discourses around political incarceration in the years 1865-1910.
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International Organizations and Government Killing: Does Naming and Shaming Save Lives?
Jacqueline DeMeritt
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do international organizations affect government killing? Extant work studies international organizations' effects on a set of human rights, but has not examined the abilities of specific actors to protect specific rights. I analyze naming and shaming by three types of international organizations (human rights nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], the news media, and the United Nations), focusing on their impacts on a single type of abuse: one-sided government killing. I present a principal-agent theory in which the government develops a preference for killing, and then delegates the murderous task to a set of individual perpetrators. The theory reveals new ways for international organizations to make killing costly, and statistical analyses support my expectations: By calling attention to abusive states, human rights NGOs and the United Nations can reduce both the likelihood and severity of state-sponsored murder. I also find that international organizations are better equipped to prevent killing from beginning than to limit mounting body counts once it has begun.
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Transparency and Corruption: Evidence from India
Leonid Peisakhin
Journal of Law and Economics, February 2012, Pages 129-149
Abstract:
Theories of corruption suggest that higher levels of transparency are necessarily associated with lower levels of corruption. Yet in highly hierarchical societies in which the gulf between government officials and the most underprivileged members of society is very wide, this relationship may not hold. In this paper, I test the link between transparency and corruption by means of a field experiment. I ask how effective recourse to a freedom-of-information law is in comparison to bribery for both slum dwellers and middle-class individuals in India as they apply for basic public services. I demonstrate that applicants who make use of the freedom-of-information law attain almost the same rate of success as those who bribe. Recourse to a freedom-of-information law comes close to erasing class differences; that is, it results in comparable processing times for slum dwellers and middle-class individuals.
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Political Institutions and Their Historical Dynamics
Mikael Sandberg & Per Lundberg
PLoS ONE, October 2012
Abstract:
Traditionally, political scientists define political institutions deductively. This approach may prevent from discovery of existing institutions beyond the definitions. Here, a principal component analysis was used for an inductive extraction of dimensions in Polity IV data on the political institutions of all nations in the world the last two centuries. Three dimensions of institutions were revealed: core institutions of democracy, oligarchy, and despotism. We show that, historically and on a world scale, the dominance of the core institutions of despotism has first been replaced by a dominance of the core institutions of oligarchy, which in turn is now being followed by an increasing dominance by the core institutions of democracy. Nations do not take steps from despotic, to oligarchic and then to democratic institutions, however. Rather, nations hosting the core democracy institutions have succeeded in historically avoiding both the core institutions of despotism and those of oligarchy. On the other hand, some nations have not been influenced by any of these dimensions, while new institutional combinations are increasingly influencing others. We show that the extracted institutional dimensions do not correspond to the Polity scores for autocracy, "anocracy" and democracy, suggesting that changes in regime types occur at one level, while institutional dynamics work on another. Political regime types in that sense seem "canalized", i.e., underlying institutional architectures can and do vary, but to a considerable extent independently of regime types and their transitions. The inductive approach adds to the deductive regime type studies in that it produces results in line with modern studies of cultural evolution and memetic institutionalism in which institutions are the units of observation, not the nations that acts as host for them.
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On the Interpretability of Law: Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions
James Melton et al.
British Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
An implicit element of many theories of constitutional enforcement is the degree to which those subject to constitutional law can agree on what its provisions mean (call this constitutional interpretability). Unfortunately, there is little evidence on baseline levels of constitutional interpretability or the variance therein. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature, by assessing the effect of contextual, textual and interpreter characteristics on the interpretability of constitutional documents. Constitutions are found to vary in their degree of interpretability. Surprisingly, however, the most important determinants of variance are not contextual (for example, era, language or culture), but textual. This result emphasizes the important role that constitutional drafters play in the implementation of their product.
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Testing the Political Replacement Effect: A Panel Data Analysis
Leone Leonida, Dario Maimone Ansaldo Patti & Pietro Navarra
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article tests for the existence of the political replacement effect, as suggested by Acemoglu and Robinson: [American Political Science Review, Vol. 100, pp. 115-131]. They argue that the implementation of market-oriented reform is crucially driven by the political calculus of incumbent governments: they implement economic policy change if such a choice is not expected to reduce their chances to retain power. This implies a non-monotonic relationship between the level of political competition and the extent of economic reform. We test this hypothesis using data for 102 countries over the period 1980 to 2005. Our results strongly support the theory.
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Bill Angelbeck & Colin Grier
Current Anthropology, October 2012, Pages 547-587
Abstract:
Throughout human history, people have lived in societies without formalized government. We argue that the theory of anarchism presents a productive framework for analyzing decentralized societies. Anarchism encompasses a broad array of interrelated principles for organizing societies without the centralization of authority. Moreover, its theory of history emphasizes an ongoing and active resistance to concentrations of power. We present an anarchist analysis of the development of social power, authority, and status within the Coast Salish region of the Northwest Coast. Coast Salish peoples exhibited complex displays of chiefly authority and class stratification but without centralized political organization. Ethnographically, their sociopolitical formation is unique in allowing a majority of "high-class" people and a minority of commoners and slaves, or what Wayne Suttles described as an "inverted-pear" society. We present the development of this sociopolitical structure through an analysis of cranial deformation from burial data and assess it in relation to periods of warfare. We determine that many aspects of Coast Salish culture include practices that resist concentrations of power. Our central point is that anarchism is useful for understanding decentralized (or anarchic) networks - those that allow for complex intergroup relations while staving off the establishment of centralized political authority.
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Mark Hauser & Douglas Armstrong
Journal of Social Archaeology, October 2012, Pages 310-333
Abstract:
In this article we examine the role of informal settlements inhabited by Europeans, Africans and, potentially, indigenous people in the eighteenth-century insular Caribbean. Rather than simply being frontier settlements established in anticipation of formal colonization, in many cases settlements on and beyond the margins of colonies represent alternative possibilities and facilitate ways of life, modes of production, and means of trade and exchange that are at odds with expected norms of colonial society. We view such settlements as holdouts, practicing what James Scott refers to as the ‘art of not being governed'. To make this argument we compare ethnohistorical data related to settlement patterns in St John and Dominica and archaeological data retrieved from household excavations of plantation settlements dating to the eighteenth century. Examining such settlements allows us to map the range of variation in colonial life during the apogee of plantation-based slavery.
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On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem
Arash Abizadeh
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Cultural-nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: Their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a prepolitical, in principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation's prepolitical culture, but it cannot fix cultural-national boundaries prepolitically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is ultimately legitimized prepolitically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a prepolitical ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory.
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Causes of corruption: Evidence from China
Bin Dong & Benno Torgler
China Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores the causes of corruption in China using provincial panel data. Using both fixed effects and instrumental variables, we find that provinces with greater anti-corruption efforts, higher educational attainment, historic influence from Anglo-American church universities, greater openness, more access to media, higher relative wages of government employees and a greater representation of women in the legislature are markedly less corrupt; whereas social heterogeneity, regulation and resources abundance breed substantial corruption. We also find that fiscal decentralization depresses corruption significantly. Finally, we identify a positive relationship between corruption and economic development in China, which is driven primarily by the transition to a market economy.
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Globalization and Political Violence, 1970-2008
Ranveig Drolsum Flaten & Indra de Soysa
International Interactions, forthcoming
Abstract:
The question of globalization´s effect on social harmony continues to be fiercely debated. We use a comprehensive measure of globalization (the KOF index) designed to capture the intensity of connectivity among countries along economic, social, and political dimensions. Our results suggest that globalization, particularly economic and social globalization, predicts a lower risk of civil war and political repression. However, it is economic globalization that predicts lower repression, even after unit heterogeneity is accounted. However, when country fixed effects are accounted, political globalization´s effect is problematic for human rights, suggesting that politically influential states escape the constraining effects of globalization on political repression. Indeed, globalization generally shows up as more important than per capita income, a variable often found to be one of the most robust determinants of political violence. The results taken together support those who argue that increased globalization may enhance prospects for social progress, not social resistance and political violence as skeptics claim.
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Courtenay Conrad
Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although they are arguably the worst violators of human rights, dictators sometimes commit to international human rights treaties like the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to appease their domestic opposition. Importantly, however, executives facing effective judiciaries must anticipate ex post costs that can arise when international treaties are likely to be enforced domestically. This suggests that one domestic institution - a political opposition party - may provide a dictator with incentives to commit to international human rights treaties and violate human rights, while another - an effective domestic judiciary - may constrain the dictator's ability to violate human rights and incentivize him to avoid international commitment. How do dictators make choices about commitment to human rights law and respect for human rights when they face conflicting domestic incentives? Furthermore, how do these divergent incentives affect compliance when dictators do commit to international treaties? In this article, I argue that the domestic incentives dictators face to support the CAT and engage in torture are moderated in countries with effective domestic judiciaries.
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Crime Victimization and Political Participation
Regina Bateson
American Political Science Review, August 2012, Pages 570-587
Abstract:
Crime victimization is an important cause of political participation. Analysis of survey data from five continents shows that individuals who report recent crime victimization participate in politics more than comparable nonvictims. Rather than becoming withdrawn or disempowered, crime victims tend to become more engaged in civic and political life. The effect of crime victimization is roughly equivalent to an additional five to ten years of education, meaning that crime victimization ranks among the most influential predictors of political participation. Prior research has shown that exposure to violence during some civil wars can result in increased political participation, but this article demonstrates that the effect of victimization extends to peacetime, to nonviolent as well as violent crimes, and across most of the world. At the same time, however, crime victimization is sometimes associated with dissatisfaction with democracy and support for authoritarianism, vigilantism, and harsh policing tactics, especially in Latin America.