Suchergebnisse

It is typically assumed that African leaders enact policies that benefit their ethnoregional group using all types of patronage. Crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many African countries, and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom. It shows, using data on 50 country-crop combinations, that cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state facehighertaxes. Furthermore, democratic regimes impose lower taxes. This paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes. African leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates. It suggests that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas, they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops, which are regionally but not individually targetable.

This article explains legislators' support for electoral reforms reducing electoral irregularities and protecting voters' autonomy at the ballot box in Britain and Germany in the late 19th century. We argue that the main political cleavage over the adoption of new legislation to limit illicit electoral practices pitted politicians able to take advantage of opportunities for vote buying and intimidation against those who could not do so because of unfavorable political and economic conditions in their district. We examine the political, partisan, and economic factors accounting for candidates' ability to engage in electoral irregularities and show that, in both countries, resource-constrained candidates were more likely to support the introduction of electoral reforms. Because the primary illicit electoral practice differs across these two cases—vote buying in Britain and economic intimidation in Germany—some of the political and economic factors accounting for legislators' support for reform differ across these cases.

The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely to vote than the rich is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in some places, the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the rich anticipate taxation, they have a greater incentive to participate in politics, and politicians are more likely to use fiscal policy to gain support. We explore two factors affecting the tax exposure of the rich-the political salience of redistribution in party politics and the state's extractive capacity. Using survey data from developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates when the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge and where bureaucratic capacity is high. Adapted from the source document.

Partly hidden beneath the complexities of N* and an attack on the supposedly individualist presumptions of ethnic fractionalization measures, a simple and valuable question lies implicit in Cederman and Girardin's (2007) article (henceforth, CG). Are countries at greater risk of civil war when the state is controlled by an ethnic minority?