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We explore the role of ruling elites in autocratic regimes and provide an assessment of tools useful to clarify the structure of opaque political environments. We first showcase the importance of analyzing autocratic regimes as non-unitary actors by discussing extant work on nondemocracies in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012480619
Regime changes toward autocracy typically reshape the judicial framework, effectively eroding the separation of powers and leading the nation toward an autocratic path. Recent instances of regime shift in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey offer templates of democratic erosion through manipulation and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014372480
opportunities to access elite status than Premodern Europe, for example via the civil service exam and the absence of hereditary … Elite-People relationship can stabilize autocratic rule. If absolute power is stronger, this stabilizing effect will be …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012482621
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/10012453681
Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012696375
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/10012465552
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/10012465922
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/10012457530
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/10012458113
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/10012460235