Similar Search Results

Resource Windfalls, Political Regimes, and Political Stability

Caselli, Francesco - 2011

We study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes. We document the following regularities. Natural resource windfalls have no effect on the political system when they occur in democracies. However, windfalls have significant political consequences...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013117944

New Tools for the Analysis of Political Power in Africa

Rainer, Ilia - 2012

The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013100130

How is Power Shared in Africa?

Francois, Patrick - 2012

employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence. As opposed to the view of a single ethnic elite … proportional allocation for the elites of each group may still result in misallocations in the non-elite population …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013100131

Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War

Jones, Benjamin F. - 2007

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination's effects. We find that, on...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012776946

The Political Economy of Warfare

Glaeser, Edward L. - 2007

Warfare is enormously destructive, and yet countries regularly initiate armed conflict against one another. Even more surprisingly, wars are often quite popular with citizens who stand to gain little materially and may lose much more. This paper presents a model of warfare as the result of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012778156

Roots of Autocracy

Galor, Oded - 2017

Exploiting a novel geo-referenced data set of population diversity across ethnic groups, this research advances the hypothesis and empirically establishes that variation in population diversity across human societies, as determined in the course of the exodus of human from Africa tens of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012959389

The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China : Theory and Empirical Evidence on the Autocrat's Trade-Off

Martinez-Bravo, Monica - 2017

We propose a simple informational theory to explain why autocratic regimes introduce local elections. Because citizens have better information on local officials than the distant central government, delegation of authority via local elections improves selection and performance of local...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012943179

How Modern Dictators Survive : An Informational Theory of the New Authoritarianism

Guriev, Sergei - 2015

infer it from signals inherent in their living standards, state propaganda, and messages sent by an informed elite via … invest in making convincing state propaganda, censoring independent media, co-opting the elite, or equipping police to … grow over time—even if living standards fall. Censorship and co-optation of the elite are substitutes, but both are …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013023344

A Theory of Minimalist Democracy

Bidner, Chris - 2014

A majority of the world democracies are far from the benchmark of representative democracy. This paper presents a model of political transitions based on a minimalist conception of the democratic state, i.e. a form of government solely characterized by competitive elections. We show that the...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013046164

Land and Power : Theory and Evidence from Chile

Baland, Jean-Marie; Robinson, James A. - 2010

We study the connection between employment and political control. Many employment relationships concede rents to workers. For example, when worker effort is crucial for production, but only imperfectly observed. We show that, depending on the political institutions, the presence of such rents...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012760647