Elements in Political Economy – serie
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24 produkter
24 produkter
One Road to Riches?
How State Building and Democratization Affect Economic Development
Häftad, Engelska, 2022
239 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Building effective state institutions before introducing democracy is widely presumed to improve different development outcomes. Conversely, proponents of this "stateness-first" argument anticipate that democratization before state building yields poor development outcomes. In this Element, we discuss several strong assumptions that (different versions of) this argument rests upon and critically evaluate the existing evidence base. In extension, we specify various observable implications. We then subject the stateness-first argument to multiple tests, focusing on economic growth as an outcome. First, we conduct historical case studies of two countries with different institutional sequencing histories, Denmark and Greece, and assess the stateness-first argument (e.g., by using a synthetic control approach). Thereafter, we draw on an extensive global sample of about 180 countries, measured across 1789-2019 and leverage panel regressions, preparametric matching, and sequence analysis to test a number of observable implications. Overall, we find little evidence to support the stateness-first argument.
239 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
We explain and document state-level fiscal developments in American Southern states from 1820-1910, focusing on their main source of revenue, progressive property taxes borne primarily by economic elites. The fourteen states in our analysis were characterized by severe economic exploitation of the enslaved and later politically repressed African-descended population by a small rural elite, who dominated the region both politically and economically. While rural elites are thought to be especially resistant to taxation, we offer a set of conditions that explains the emergence of progressive taxation and provides a coherent account of the fiscal development of these states over this period. Using an original, archival data set of annual tax revenues and select expenditure items, we show that the economic interests of these rural elites and the extent of their formal (over)representation played a critical role in shaping the observed fiscal patterns within and across these states over this period. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Democratization and the State
Competence, Control, and Performance in Indonesia's Civil Service
Häftad, Engelska, 2022
232 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Does democratization lead to more meritocracy in the civil service? The Element argues that electoral accountability increases the value of competence over personal loyalty in the civil service. While this resembles an application of merit principles, it does not automatically reduce patronage politics or improve public goods provision. Competent civil servants are often used to facilitate the distribution of clientelistic goods at mass scale to win competitive elections. The selection of competent but less loyal civil servants requires the increased use of control mechanisms, like the timing of promotions, to ensure their compliance. The Element tests these claims using novel micro-level data on promotions in Indonesia's civil service before and after democratization in 1999. The Element shows that national- and local-level elections led to increased promotion premiums for educated civil servants, and simultaneously generated electoral cycles in the timing of promotions, but did little to improve public goods provision.
232 kr
Kommande
Across history, lotteries were used in political selection to combat corruption, ideological polarization, and inequity in access to governance. Today, democracy seems to be facing similar challenges - are lotteries a potential solution? This Element responds to recent calls to incorporate lotteries in democracy, by analyzing historical cases of their use. We focus on the rationale behind and benefits of lotteries - to prevent elite capture, equalize access to power, and improve deliberation - and then the details of their implementation. Drawing on academic research, our chapters analyze the use of lottery-based selection in pre-modern Greece and medieval Florence, and present original micro-level empirical data on lottery-based selection in the construction of the 1848 Danish constitution and in parliaments in 19th century Europe. We conclude with a discussion of how these analyses inform the use of lotteries in modern day governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
215 kr
Skickas
This Element presents newly-collected cross-national data on reelection rates of lower house national legislators from almost 100 democracies around the world. Reelection rates are low/high in countries where clientelism and vote buying are high/low. Drawing on theory developed to study lobbying, the authors explain why politicians continue clientelist activities although they do not secure reelection. The Element also provides a thorough review of the last decade of literature on clientelism, which the authors define as discretionary resource distribution by political actors. The combination of novel empirical data and theoretically-grounded analysis provides a radically new perspective on clientelism. Finally, the Element suggests that clientelism evolves with economic development, assuming new forms in highly developed democracies but never entirely disappearing.
214 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Just as councils and assemblies were central to European polities for centuries, the Imperial Examination System (Keju) constituted the cornerstone of state institutions in China. This Element argues that Keju contributed to political stability, and its emergence was a process, not a shock, with consequences initially unanticipated by its contemporaries. The Element documents the emergence of Keju using evidence from early Chinese empires to the end of the Tang Dynasty in the 10th century, including epitaphs and government documents. It then traces the selection criteria of Keju and trends in social mobility over the second millennium, leveraging biographical information from over 70,000 examinees and 1,500 ministers and their descendants. The Element uses a panel of 112 historical polities to quantify Keju's association with country-level political indicators against the backdrop of global convergence in political stability and divergence in institutions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
771 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
We explain and document state-level fiscal developments in American Southern states from 1820-1910, focusing on their main source of revenue, progressive property taxes borne primarily by economic elites. The fourteen states in our analysis were characterized by severe economic exploitation of the enslaved and later politically repressed African-descended population by a small rural elite, who dominated the region both politically and economically. While rural elites are thought to be especially resistant to taxation, we offer a set of conditions that explains the emergence of progressive taxation and provides a coherent account of the fiscal development of these states over this period. Using an original, archival data set of annual tax revenues and select expenditure items, we show that the economic interests of these rural elites and the extent of their formal (over)representation played a critical role in shaping the observed fiscal patterns within and across these states over this period. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
748 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
This Element investigates the process of executive aggrandizement to identify factors associated with democratic resilience. We focus on five democracies that showed resilience in the face of incumbent-led autocratization. To understand how these cases survived, we pair them with similar cases where incumbents successfully dismantled democracy from within. Through structured focused comparisons, our inductive exercise provides insights into how the process of executive aggrandizement unfolds. The case narratives reveal similar patterns, with incumbents often targeting the media, civil society, and judiciary and using shared tactics to weaken democratic institutions. Where democracies survived, anti-democratic incumbents made critical errors, including major policy blunders and miscalculations, which ultimately cost them their positions and allowed democracy to rebound. Where democracy broke down, incumbents were largely able to avoid or mitigate such errors, often through ethnopopulist appeals.
232 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
This Element investigates the process of executive aggrandizement to identify factors associated with democratic resilience. We focus on five democracies that showed resilience in the face of incumbent-led autocratization. To understand how these cases survived, we pair them with similar cases where incumbents successfully dismantled democracy from within. Through structured focused comparisons, our inductive exercise provides insights into how the process of executive aggrandizement unfolds. The case narratives reveal similar patterns, with incumbents often targeting the media, civil society, and judiciary and using shared tactics to weaken democratic institutions. Where democracies survived, anti-democratic incumbents made critical errors, including major policy blunders and miscalculations, which ultimately cost them their positions and allowed democracy to rebound. Where democracy broke down, incumbents were largely able to avoid or mitigate such errors, often through ethnopopulist appeals.
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Economic Development, Regime Change, and State Formation, 800-1800
Inbunden, Engelska, 2026
771 kr
Kommande
This Element argues that settlers from Western Europe shaped European state formation and transformed the political and economic fate of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia between 800 and 1800. While existing work on European colonization focuses on overseas settlers, and studies of Europe's development tend to concentrate on the continent's western regions, the Element highlights a significant internal wave of settlement from Western to Eastern and Northern Europe. Beginning around 1100 and tapering off after 1400, this settler movement spurred economic development and the spread of local self-government across Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Settlers also provided institutional templates that local rulers adapted in their efforts to build states. These rulers were increasingly compelled to bargain with politically autonomous and large cities. Over time, the emergence of new states in Eastern Europe intensified geopolitical competition across the continent.
How Settlers Shaped Eastern Europe and Scandinavia
Economic Development, Regime Change, and State Formation, 800-1800
Häftad, Engelska, 2026
239 kr
Kommande
This Element argues that settlers from Western Europe shaped European state formation and transformed the political and economic fate of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia between 800 and 1800. While existing work on European colonization focuses on overseas settlers, and studies of Europe's development tend to concentrate on the continent's western regions, the Element highlights a significant internal wave of settlement from Western to Eastern and Northern Europe. Beginning around 1100 and tapering off after 1400, this settler movement spurred economic development and the spread of local self-government across Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Settlers also provided institutional templates that local rulers adapted in their efforts to build states. These rulers were increasingly compelled to bargain with politically autonomous and large cities. Over time, the emergence of new states in Eastern Europe intensified geopolitical competition across the continent.
748 kr
Kommande
Across history, lotteries were used in political selection to combat corruption, ideological polarization, and inequity in access to governance. Today, democracy seems to be facing similar challenges - are lotteries a potential solution? This Element responds to recent calls to incorporate lotteries in democracy, by analyzing historical cases of their use. We focus on the rationale behind and benefits of lotteries - to prevent elite capture, equalize access to power, and improve deliberation - and then the details of their implementation. Drawing on academic research, our chapters analyze the use of lottery-based selection in pre-modern Greece and medieval Florence, and present original micro-level empirical data on lottery-based selection in the construction of the 1848 Danish constitution and in parliaments in 19th century Europe. We conclude with a discussion of how these analyses inform the use of lotteries in modern day governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
748 kr
Kommande
The digital age has afforded autocrats new technologies of control, allowing it to co-opt, pre-empt and repress dissent. But, what if they lack the technical capacity to access digital tools of control? In what ways have digital technologies altered the way autocratic states conduct statecraft? Based on an analysis of more than 3,000 public procurement documents, and a dozen elite interviews with various stakeholders, we found that the Chinese state has outsourced various functions of online surveillance to private and for-profit arms of state-owned corporations. We found that outsourcing surveillance is intended to augment state technical capacity to moderate and fine-tune the conduct of digital repression. Outsourcing digital repression opens up a pandora box of state-business collaborations in autocratic settings. This Element contributes to the literature on outsourcing repression, state‒business relations, and conduct of digital statecraft.
232 kr
Kommande
The digital age has afforded autocrats new technologies of control, allowing it to co-opt, pre-empt and repress dissent. But, what if they lack the technical capacity to access digital tools of control? In what ways have digital technologies altered the way autocratic states conduct statecraft? Based on an analysis of more than 3,000 public procurement documents, and a dozen elite interviews with various stakeholders, we found that the Chinese state has outsourced various functions of online surveillance to private and for-profit arms of state-owned corporations. We found that outsourcing surveillance is intended to augment state technical capacity to moderate and fine-tune the conduct of digital repression. Outsourcing digital repression opens up a pandora box of state-business collaborations in autocratic settings. This Element contributes to the literature on outsourcing repression, state‒business relations, and conduct of digital statecraft.
662 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Just as councils and assemblies were central to European polities for centuries, the Imperial Examination System (Keju) constituted the cornerstone of state institutions in China. This Element argues that Keju contributed to political stability, and its emergence was a process, not a shock, with consequences initially unanticipated by its contemporaries. The Element documents the emergence of Keju using evidence from early Chinese empires to the end of the Tang Dynasty in the 10th century, including epitaphs and government documents. It then traces the selection criteria of Keju and trends in social mobility over the second millennium, leveraging biographical information from over 70,000 examinees and 1,500 ministers and their descendants. The Element uses a panel of 112 historical polities to quantify Keju's association with country-level political indicators against the backdrop of global convergence in political stability and divergence in institutions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
232 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
State capacity - the government's ability to accomplish its intended policy goals - plays an important role in market-oriented economic development today. Yet state capacity improvements are often difficult to achieve. This Element analyzes the historical origins of state capacity. It evaluates long-run state development in Western Europe - the birthplace of both the modern state and modern economic growth - with a focus on three key inflection points: the rise of the city-state, the nation-state, and the welfare state. This Element develops a conceptual framework regarding the basic political conditions that enable the state to take effective policy actions. This framework highlights the government's challenge to exert proper authority over both its citizenry and itself. It concludes by analyzing the European state development process relative to other world regions. This analysis characterizes the basic historical features that helped make Western Europe different. By taking a long-run approach, it provides a new perspective on the deep-rooted relationship between state capacity and economic development.
Nativism and Economic Integration across the Developing World
Collision and Accommodation
Häftad, Engelska, 2019
239 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Migration and nativism are explosive issues in Europe and North America. Less well-known is the tumult that soaring migration is creating in the politics of developing countries. The key difference between anti-migrant politics in developed and developing countries is that domestic migration - not international migration - is the likely focus of nativist politics in poorer countries. Nativists take up the cause of sub-national groups, vilifying other regions and groups within the country as sources of migration. Since the 1970s, the majority of less-developed countries have adopted policies that aim to limit internal migration. This Element marshals evidence from around the world to explore the colliding trends of internal migration and nativism. Subnational migration is associated with a boom in nativist politics. Pro-native public policy and anti-migrant riots are both more likely when internal migration surges. Political decentralization strengthens subnational politicians' incentives and ability to define and cater to nativists.
232 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
What are the social and political consequences of poor state governance and low state legitimacy? Under what conditions does lynching - lethal, extralegal group violence to punish offenses to the community - become an acceptable practice? We argue lynching emerges when neither the state nor its challengers have a monopoly over legitimate authority. When authority is contested or ambiguous, mass punishment for transgressions can emerge that is public, brutal, and requires broad participation. Using new cross-national data, we demonstrate lynching is a persistent problem in dozens of countries over the last four decades. Drawing on original survey and interview data from Haiti and South Africa, we show how lynching emerges and becomes accepted. Specifically, support for lynching most likely occurs in one of three conditions: when states fail to provide governance, when non-state actors provide social services, or when neighbors must rely on self-help.
239 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Throughout history, reform has provoked rebellion - not just by the losers from reform, but also among its intended beneficiaries. Finkel and Gehlbach emphasize that, especially in weak states, reform often must be implemented by local actors with a stake in the status quo. In this setting, the promise of reform represents an implicit contract against which subsequent implementation is measured: when implementation falls short of this promise, citizens are aggrieved and more likely to rebel. Finkel and Gehlbach explore this argument in the context of Russia's emancipation of the serfs in 1861 - a fundamental reform of Russian state and society that paradoxically encouraged unrest among the peasants who were its prime beneficiaries. They further examine the empirical reach of their theory through narrative analyses of the Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, land reform in ancient Rome, the abolition of feudalism during the French Revolution, and land reform in contemporary Latin America.
239 kr
Skickas inom 7-10 vardagar
Economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. Since the dawn of industrialization and democratization in the late eighteenth century, there has been a succession of political economic frameworks, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, trade, global connections, political power, and the expansion of citizenship. The challenges of today reveal the need for a new moral political economy that recognizes the politics in political economy. It also requires the redesign of our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists. This Element makes some progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering both a theory of change and some principles for institutional (re)design.
239 kr
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In this Element, we investigate how economic geography, the distribution of subnational economic endowments within a nation, shapes long-run patterns of inequality through its impact on the development of fiscal capacity. We present an argument that links economic geography to capacity through different types of industrialization processes. We show how early industrializers shape spatial distributions domestically by investing in productivity across their nations, and externally by reinforcing spatial polarization among late industrializers. We also show how differences in economic geography impact the process of capacity building, setting the stage for the modern politics of redistribution discussed in Volume II. We support this argument with descriptive data, case studies, and cross-national analyses.
232 kr
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This Element examines how the changing economic basis of parliamentary elections in nineteenth century England and Wales contributed to the development of modern parties and elections. Even after the 1832 Reform Act expanded the British electorate, elections in many constituencies went uncontested, party labels were nominal, and candidates spent large sums treating and bribing voters. By the end of the century, however, almost every constituency was contested, candidates stood as representatives of national parties, and campaigns were fought on the basis of policies. We show how industrialization, the spread of literacy, and the rise of cheap newspapers, encouraged candidates to enter and contest constituencies. The increased expense that came from fighting frequent elections in larger constituencies induced co-partisan candidates to form slates. This imparted a uniform partisan character to parliamentary elections that facilitated the emergence of programmatic political parties.
239 kr
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Assaults on democracy are increasingly coming from the actions of duly elected governments, rather than coups. Backsliding examines the processes through which elected rulers weaken checks on executive power, curtail political and civil liberties, and undermine the integrity of the electoral system. Drawing on detailed case studies, including the United States and countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, the book focuses on three, inter-related causal mechanisms: the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and the incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps them off balance. A concluding chapter looks at the international context of backsliding and the role of new technologies in these processes. An online appendix provides detailed accounts of backsliding in 16 countries, which can be found at www.cambridge.org/backsliding.
233 kr
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This Element details how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, the authors discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites' perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the elites' interpretation of information signals. These developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social transfer programs. The authors assess their argument by using original qualitative and quantitative data. First, they document changes in perceptions of revolutionary threat and strategic policy concessions in early inter-war Norway by using archival and other sources. Second, they code, for example, representatives at the 1919 Comintern meeting to proxy for credibility of domestic revolutionary threat in cross-national analysis. States facing greater threats expanded various social policies to a larger extent than other countries, and some of these differences persisted for decades.