Suchergebnisse

We distinguish between three sets of rights – property rights, political rights, and civil rights – and provide a taxonomy of political regimes. The distinctive nature of liberal democracy is that it protects civil rights (equality before the law for minorities) in addition to the other two. When democratic transitions are the product of a settlement between the elite (who care mostly about property rights) and the majority (who care mostly about political rights), they generically fail to produce liberal democracy. This is because the minority has neither the resources nor the numbers to make a contribution to the settlement. We develop a formal model to sharpen the contrast between electoral and liberal democracies and highlight circumstances under which liberal democracy can emerge. We show that liberal democracy requires quite special circumstances: mild levels of income inequality as well as weak identity cleavages. We provide some evidence consistent with this result, and also present a new classification of countries as electoral or liberal democracies.

Witnessing the actual Trump presidency, one searches for conceptual tools to document US decline. The World Justice Project (WJP) comes to mind, attempting to measure rule of law (RL) comparatively. The WJP presents interesting findings for 2017-2020. Canada ranks higher than USA. Venezuela is bottom 128 country. Rationale of rule of law?Keywords. Limited government; Countervailing competences; Natural regularity; Moral law of nature; Locke.JEL. D72; P16; P26; P48.

Cover -- P0 -- P1 -- P2 -- P3 -- P4 -- P5 -- P6 -- P7 -- P8 -- P9 -- P10 -- P11 -- P12 -- P13 -- P14 -- P15 -- P16 -- P17 -- P18 -- P19 -- P20 -- P21 -- P22 -- P23 -- P24 -- P25 -- P26 -- P27 -- P28 -- P29 -- P30 -- P31 -- P32 -- P33 -- P34 -- P35 -- P36 -- P37 -- P38 -- P39 -- P40 -- P41 -- P42 -- P43 -- P44 -- P45 -- P46 -- P47 -- P48 -- P49.

We use a novel method to measure racism at both the individual and the country level. We show that our measure of racism has a strong negative and significant impact on economic development, quality of institutions and education. We then test different hypotheses concerning the origin of racism and its channels of impact in order to establish causality. We find that racism is not correlated with any possible measure of coexistence of different racial or ethnic groups, like ethno-linguistic fragmentation, share of migrants, or ethnically-motivated conflicts among others. Racism has a negative effect on social capital measured as generalized trust and voice and accountability. More importantly, we show that for former colonies, racism is strongly correlated with the presence of extractive institutions during the colonial time, even when we control for current institutions, current GDP per capita or current education. We argue that extractive colonial institutions not only had a negative impact on the political and economic institutions of the colonized countries, but also shaped the cultural values of the population. We claim that colonial powers instilled racism among the population of their colonies in order to weaken their ability for collective action, justify their own role as extractive elite in the eyes of the ruled and facilitate the internal cohesion of the elite. We also show that, at the individual level and using country fixed effects, racism is negatively correlated with those cultural values that one would expect if an extractive elite would be able to decide the cultural values of the society they control: lower trust, higher obedience, lower respect for others, lower feeling of control of one's live, lower preference for democracy, higher support for military intervention of the government, lower preference for political participation, lower valuation of civil rights, higher preference for state intervention in the economy, lower support for economic competition, and higher acceptance of dishonest behavior. We finally show that racism still has a significant impact on our outcome variables even when we control for these potential cultural correlates.

This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the conditions of self-enforcing democracy by analyzing the recent wave of autocratic transitions. Based on a game-theoretic framework, we work out the conditions under which governments may induce the diverse public authorities to coordinate on extra-constitutional activities, eventually transforming the politico-institutional setting into one of autocratic rule. We find three empirically testable characteristics that promote this coordination process, namely: populism and public support, corruption, and a lack in the separation of powers. By contrast, low degrees of corruption and strongly separated powers can be viewed as prerequisites to self-enforcing democracy.

This paper provides a simply theory to explain the impact of sanctions on a regime's policies and behavior. Sanctions are generally put to strip the target country from its available rents and weaken the government's stance against growing discontent in the population. We show however that sanctions may give legitimacy to an incumbent government by influencing the optimal level of religious ideology provided by the state and further stabilizing its grip to power and rents. While in a good state of nature sanctions build resilience as long as religious ideology among the population is strong, at bad times they compel the target country to move towards ideological moderation. In a world of asymmetric information, the target country always finds it optimal to send an accurate signal in order to successfully convince the imposing side to lift sanctions and reach a win-win outcome.

Quand les banquiers centraux sont-ils destitués ? Cet article montre que la probabilité de remplacement d'un gouverneur de banque centrale est positivement liée à la part du mandat déjà effectuée, aux crises bancaires et monétaires, aux élections, aux réformes des statuts des banques centrales, ainsi qu'à l'inflation. En outre, il est montré que les résultats dépendent de la régularité ou de l'irrégularité du remplacement, et de ce qu'il intervient avant ou après le terme de la durée légale du mandat. JEL Code: E58, G01, P48

In this paper we trace the relation between economic growth, public debt and social spending treated as a proxy for welfare state spending in the context of 2008+ crisis in advanced capitalist economies. We focus on the alleged causality between high welfare spending and growing public debt which is often said to have contributed to the current debt crisis experienced by many countries and we elaborate on the often heralded thesis that high social spending leads to low growth levels. By doing so we intend to find out if welfare states can indeed be identified as a source of current fiscal problems and prosperity issues. We perform our analysis on a group of 21 highly developed countries in 1991–2014 period basing on OECD data. Our findings suggest that evidence to support such theses are mixed and rather weak and do not allow for drawing firm conclusions about harmful impact of welfare state on economic performance. On this background we also comment on the usability of statistics and case studies in social sciences.

The main objective of this paper is to highlight the concept of corruption and analyses our cumulative knowledge about corruption's effects on the economic growth in Algeria during the period 2002–2015. This article emphasizes the major source of corruption and how the quality of institutions and government policies could mitigate the risk of corruption or increase it. The findings also show the great role of free media in most developing countries which created a new tendency to talk about the effects of corruption especially in recent years. Using a multiple regression model, we find that a 1% decrease in the corruption index CPI level increases the GDP growth rate by approximately 2,005%. The analysis also revealed that there is a negative relationship between the country rank and the economic growth. Finally, the results suggest that more economic freedom, social and political stability lead to less corruption.

In this paper we trace the relation between economic growth, public debt and social spending treated as a proxy for welfare state spending in the context of 2008+ crisis in advanced capitalist economies. We focus on the alleged causality between high welfare spending and growing public debt which is often said to have contributed to the current debt crisis experienced by many countries and we elaborate on the often heralded thesis that high social spending leads to low growth levels. By doing so we intend to find out if welfare states can indeed be identified as a source of current fiscal problems and prosperity issues. We perform our analysis on a group of 21 highly developed countries in 1991–2014 period basing on OECD data. Our findings suggest that evidence to support such theses are mixed and rather weak and do not allow for drawing firm conclusions about harmful impact of welfare state on economic performance. On this background we also comment on the usability of statistics and case studies in social sciences.

This paper uses a detailed database of political violence in Egypt to study European and US tourists' attitudes towards travelling to a conflict region. We use time series analysis to study the heterogeneous impacts of different dimensions of political violence and counter-violence on tourist flows to Egypt in the 1990s. We find that both US and EU tourists respond negatively to attacks on tourists, but do not appear to be influenced by casualties arising in confrontations between domestic groups. However, European tourists are sensitive to the counter-violence measures implemented by the Egyptian government. There is also evidence of tourism in Egypt being affected by the Israeli / Palestinian conflict, with arrivals of tourists into Egypt rising when fatalities in Israel increase.

Using the model, this study makes eight policy recommendations for creating a new postwar deterrent world order when the warring parties are authoritarian dictatorships with veto power and nuclear powers. First, as long as the ceasefire condition is the abandonment of an independent state by a dictatorship and the retention of an independent state by an invaded state, ceasefire negotiations tend to be parallel unless a mediator is obtained; Second, since democratic states require public consent before the decision to start the war, the obstacles to the start of the war are this is greater than in dictatorships. Third, the distance between a dictatorship and a country determines the decisions of its leaders. The greater the distance, the more likely it is to provide only economic assistance. The closer a country is to the point where it feels threatened if the occupation is tolerated, the more military assistance it will provide. Fourth, when a dictatorship initiates a war of aggression, neighboring countries tend to use economic sanctions to weaken the dictatorship's ability to wage war to avoid a major-power war. Fifth, it is essential to introduce a system in which the veto power of a permanent member of the UN Security Council is suspended if it violates the UN Charter or is a war party. The sixth is the establishment of a permanent UN force that can intervene in areas of conflict by a certain level of resolution of the UN General Assembly. Register with the UN volunteer soldiers who can act in the exercise of war, so that they can be deployed early in the event of a war of aggression by a major power against a minor power. Eighth, make wartime statements by dictators and leaders of invaded countries in the media and elsewhere binding under international law.Keywords. Veto power; Dictator; Authoritarian states.JEL. F51; F52; P16; P26; P48.

Abstract. This study provides theoretical conditions for a stable political system. This study has the trade-off that military support for the rulers simultaneously encourages military build-up, resulting in closed authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism and stabilising military regimes, while at the same time giving the military a stronger voice, which is a cost for the rulers. Democracies that are not aligned with the military are shown to be unstable. Despite the assumption of a path-dependent model, electoral authoritarianism is a stable system in countries where the initial political system is strengthened, but where the balance between citizens and the military is struck and the amount of real resources is not sufficient for the number of resources demanded by the citizens.Keywords. Path dependency; Democracy; Electoral authoritarian; Closed authoritarian; Military.JEL. P16; P26; P48.