This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental … cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two … “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and …

this change to the reversal in the nature of economic institutions, which eat underwent a series of growth … coincided with a deepening in Turkish democracy under the prodding and the guidance of the European Union, and witnessed the …

institutions. We bolster these baseline findings using an instrumental-variables strategy exploiting regional democratization waves … and surveys, we show that individuals with longer exposure to democracy display stronger support for democratic … and focusing on immigrants' exposure to democracy before migration. In all cases, the timing and nature of the effects are …

unrest or revolution and this may force the elite to democratize. Democracy may not consolidate because it is more … redistributive than a nondemocratic regime, and this gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup. Because inequality makes democracy … more costly for the elite, highly unequal societies are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating …

An influential thesis often associated with De Tocqueville views social mobility as a bulwark of democracy: when … force making democracy less stable in societies with high social mobility: when the median voter expects to move up … conflicting preferences of her “future selves,” and that the evolution of institutions is determined through the implicit …