Studies of social unrest typically focus on either structural factors or diffusion. We argue that... more Studies of social unrest typically focus on either structural factors or diffusion. We argue that the two are closely linked, and examine the importance of three categories of structural factors, how changes in local factors can generate unrest in other areas through diffusion, and the extent to which different factors affect a location's susceptibility to unrest diffusing in from elsewhere. Using data from the English Swing riots of 1830-31, an episode that involved nearly 3,000 incidents, allows us to observe the structural factors relevant to specific incidents in a way that is not possible with contemporary data. We find that factors related to economic activity triggered the unrest, both economic factors and local leadership facilitated its diffusion, and diffusion multiplied by 3.15 the effect of an increase in a local factor. The complex interplay between structural factors and diffusion we uncover is of relevance to contemporary episodes of social unrest.
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
Coups, understood as attempts to overthrow the sitting executive government by a group inside the... more Coups, understood as attempts to overthrow the sitting executive government by a group inside the state apparatus that includes part of the military, shape competition for office in authoritarian regimes. They do that both directly through actual coups and indirectly through the threat of a coup, which forces incumbent autocrats to balance loyalty and repression to pre-empt being overthrown. The chapter presents a framework for the study of coups and uses it to examine how coups can help select autocrats and to some extent keep them accountable. It presents a number of stylized facts about coups and summarizes the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of coups in autocracies.
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their co... more Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising, allowing us to estimate the role of contagion in the spread of the riots. We find that local (rather than national) sources of information were central in driving contagion, and that this contagion magnified the impact that social and economic fundamentals had on riots by a factor of 2.65. Our historical data allow us to overcome a number of econometric challenges, but the Swing riots are of independent interest as well: they contributed to the passage of the Great Reform Act, a key step in Britain's institutional development.
Revolution itself brings seismic political changes to whichever country it takes place in. But wh... more Revolution itself brings seismic political changes to whichever country it takes place in. But what of the threat of revolution? The theory that it does is well-established, and Toke S. Aidt, Gabriel Leon, Raphael Franck, Peter S. Jensen provide further evidence in support of the claim here here.
This paper studies a new mechanism that allows political elites from a nondemocratic regime to su... more This paper studies a new mechanism that allows political elites from a nondemocratic regime to survive a democratic transition: connections. We document this mechanism in the transition from the Vichy regime to democracy in post-World War II France. The parliamentarians who had supported the Vichy regime were purged in a two-stage process where each case was judged twice by two different courts. Using a difference-indifferences strategy, we show that Law graduates, a powerful social group in French politics with strong connections to one of the two courts, had a clearance rate that was 10 percentage points higher than others. This facilitated the persistence of that elite group. A systematic analysis of 17,589 documents from the defendants' dossiers is consistent with the hypothesis that the connections of Law graduates to one of the two courts were a major driver of their ability to avoid the purge. We consider and rule out alternative mechanisms.
Corruption is a persistent feature of human societies over time and space. The sale of parliament... more Corruption is a persistent feature of human societies over time and space. The sale of parliamentary seats in the "rotten boroughs" of Great Britain before the Great Reform Act of 1832 and "machine politics" in the expanding immigrant cities in the United States at the turn of the 19th century are just two historical examples. Contemporaneous examples also abound, and not only from developing countries, such as Nigeria, India and the Philippines, and transition economies, such as Russia. The recent "expenses scandal" that engulfed the House of Commons in the United Kingdom serves as a timely reminder that corruption regularly shows its face also in the developed world. CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
It is by now well-established in the development economics literature that institutions play a vi... more It is by now well-established in the development economics literature that institutions play a vital role in shaping social, economic, and political incentives, reducing transaction costs and uncertainty, and promoting long-run economic growth. Following recent developments on the measurement of socio-economic progress, which emphasize the importance of many non-economic dimensions of quality of life, the goal of this special issue is to encourage new socio-economic research on the relationship between institutions and well-being in this broader sense. Here, we provide a brief overview of the existing literature on institutions and well-being and then summarize the papers in this special issue according to three unifying themes (1) economic freedom studies; (2) institutions and long-run growth, and (3) well-being and institutions in transition economies. We conclude by discussing some challenges for future research.
Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor... more Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address this question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was decisively defeated three times due to a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP's own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave leaning constituencies.
Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their co... more Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising, allowing us to estimate the role of contagion in the spread of the riots. We find that local (rather than national) sources of information were central in driving contagion, and that this contagion magnified the impact that social and economic fundamentals had on riots by a factor of 2.65. Our historical data allow us to overcome a number of econometric challenges, but the Swing riots are of independent interest as well: they contributed to the passage of the Great Reform Act, a key step in Britain's institutional development.
In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national bor... more In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external economic and political costs, foreign state and non-state actors have an interest in influencing policy actions in other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities and takes many forms. We distinguish three broad types of intervention strategies, (i) voluntary agreement interventions between the intervening foreign power and the target country, (ii) policy interventions based on rewarding or sanctioning the target country to obtain a specific change in policy and (iii) institution interventions aimed at influencing the policy choice by changing the political institutions in the target country (with or without a civil war). We propose a unifying theoretical framework to understand when and which form of foreign influence is chosen and use it to organize and evaluate the new political economics literature on foreign influence along with work in cognate disciplines. Foreign intervention plays a more important role for a proper understanding of domestic policy choices, for institutional dynamics and for internal conflict than is commonly acknowledged in both empirical and theoretical research.
The Redistribution Hypothesis predicts that franchise extension causes an increase in state-spons... more The Redistribution Hypothesis predicts that franchise extension causes an increase in state-sponsored redistribution. We test this hypothesis by considering the relationship between franchise extension and selected aspects of fiscal structure at both central and local government levels in the UK from 1820 to 1913. We do so without imposing a priori restrictions on the direction of causality using a novel method for causal investigation of non-experimental data proposed by Hoover (2001). This method is based on tests for structural breaks in the conditional and marginal distributions of the franchise and fiscal structure time series preceded by a detailed historical narrative analysis. We do not find compelling evidence supporting the Redistribution Hypothesis.
In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national bor... more In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external economic and political costs, foreign state and non-state actors have an interest in influencing policy actions in other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities and takes three principal forms: (i) voluntary agreements, (ii) policy interventions based on rewarding or sanctioning the target country to obtain a specific change in policy, and (iii) institution interventions aimed at influencing the political institutions in the target country. We propose a unifying theoretical framework to study when foreign influence is chosen and in which form, and use it to organize and evaluate the new political economics literature on foreign influence along with work in cognate disciplines (JEL D72, D74, F51, F53, P26, P33).
Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor... more Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address that question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was defeated decisively three times following a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP’s own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave-leaning constituencies.
The Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on... more The Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of democratization: public opinion, political expedience, and threat of revolution. Peaceful agitation and mass-support for reform played an important role. Political expedience also motivated some members of Parliament to support the reform, especially if they were elected in constituencies located in counties that would gain seats. Violent unrest in urban but not in rural areas had some influence on the members of Parliament. Counterfactual scenarios suggest that the reform bill would not have obtained a majority in the House of Commons in the absence of these factors.
We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves toward democracy in ... more We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves toward democracy in sub-Saharan Africa and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact on democratic change and supports the “window of opportunity” hypothesis: droughts lead to an increase in the threat of conflict, and incumbents often respond by making democratic concessions.
This paper tests the hypothesis that the threat of revolution caused the elite to extend the voti... more This paper tests the hypothesis that the threat of revolution caused the elite to extend the voting franchise, as suggested by Acemoglu and Robinson [Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1167-1199, 2000]. We propose new measures of the threat of revolution and estimate the relationship between these and measures of su¤rage reform on a sample of 12 western European countries covering the period from 1820 to 1938. We …nd strong support for the "threat of revolution hypothesis". We also …nd some evidence that war mattered for the extension of the franchise, whereas modernization theory receives little support.
Does local democracy help or hinder the solution of collective action problems? We study this que... more Does local democracy help or hinder the solution of collective action problems? We study this question in the context of public spending on health-related urban amenities in a panel of 75 municipal boroughs in England and Wales in 1868, 1871 and 1886. We …nd evidence of a U-shaped relationship between spending on urban amenities and the extension of the local voting franchise. We argue that this retrenchment e¤ect arose because middle class taxpayers were unwilling to pay the cost of poor sanitation and the urban elites, elected on a narrow franchise, were instrumental for sanitary improvements. Our model of taxpayer democracy suggests that the retrenchment e¤ect is related to forced enfranchisement of the middle class through nationwide reforms.
Studies of social unrest typically focus on either structural factors or diffusion. We argue that... more Studies of social unrest typically focus on either structural factors or diffusion. We argue that the two are closely linked, and examine the importance of three categories of structural factors, how changes in local factors can generate unrest in other areas through diffusion, and the extent to which different factors affect a location's susceptibility to unrest diffusing in from elsewhere. Using data from the English Swing riots of 1830-31, an episode that involved nearly 3,000 incidents, allows us to observe the structural factors relevant to specific incidents in a way that is not possible with contemporary data. We find that factors related to economic activity triggered the unrest, both economic factors and local leadership facilitated its diffusion, and diffusion multiplied by 3.15 the effect of an increase in a local factor. The complex interplay between structural factors and diffusion we uncover is of relevance to contemporary episodes of social unrest.
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
Coups, understood as attempts to overthrow the sitting executive government by a group inside the... more Coups, understood as attempts to overthrow the sitting executive government by a group inside the state apparatus that includes part of the military, shape competition for office in authoritarian regimes. They do that both directly through actual coups and indirectly through the threat of a coup, which forces incumbent autocrats to balance loyalty and repression to pre-empt being overthrown. The chapter presents a framework for the study of coups and uses it to examine how coups can help select autocrats and to some extent keep them accountable. It presents a number of stylized facts about coups and summarizes the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of coups in autocracies.
If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination... more If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections.
Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their co... more Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising, allowing us to estimate the role of contagion in the spread of the riots. We find that local (rather than national) sources of information were central in driving contagion, and that this contagion magnified the impact that social and economic fundamentals had on riots by a factor of 2.65. Our historical data allow us to overcome a number of econometric challenges, but the Swing riots are of independent interest as well: they contributed to the passage of the Great Reform Act, a key step in Britain's institutional development.
Revolution itself brings seismic political changes to whichever country it takes place in. But wh... more Revolution itself brings seismic political changes to whichever country it takes place in. But what of the threat of revolution? The theory that it does is well-established, and Toke S. Aidt, Gabriel Leon, Raphael Franck, Peter S. Jensen provide further evidence in support of the claim here here.
This paper studies a new mechanism that allows political elites from a nondemocratic regime to su... more This paper studies a new mechanism that allows political elites from a nondemocratic regime to survive a democratic transition: connections. We document this mechanism in the transition from the Vichy regime to democracy in post-World War II France. The parliamentarians who had supported the Vichy regime were purged in a two-stage process where each case was judged twice by two different courts. Using a difference-indifferences strategy, we show that Law graduates, a powerful social group in French politics with strong connections to one of the two courts, had a clearance rate that was 10 percentage points higher than others. This facilitated the persistence of that elite group. A systematic analysis of 17,589 documents from the defendants' dossiers is consistent with the hypothesis that the connections of Law graduates to one of the two courts were a major driver of their ability to avoid the purge. We consider and rule out alternative mechanisms.
Corruption is a persistent feature of human societies over time and space. The sale of parliament... more Corruption is a persistent feature of human societies over time and space. The sale of parliamentary seats in the "rotten boroughs" of Great Britain before the Great Reform Act of 1832 and "machine politics" in the expanding immigrant cities in the United States at the turn of the 19th century are just two historical examples. Contemporaneous examples also abound, and not only from developing countries, such as Nigeria, India and the Philippines, and transition economies, such as Russia. The recent "expenses scandal" that engulfed the House of Commons in the United Kingdom serves as a timely reminder that corruption regularly shows its face also in the developed world. CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
It is by now well-established in the development economics literature that institutions play a vi... more It is by now well-established in the development economics literature that institutions play a vital role in shaping social, economic, and political incentives, reducing transaction costs and uncertainty, and promoting long-run economic growth. Following recent developments on the measurement of socio-economic progress, which emphasize the importance of many non-economic dimensions of quality of life, the goal of this special issue is to encourage new socio-economic research on the relationship between institutions and well-being in this broader sense. Here, we provide a brief overview of the existing literature on institutions and well-being and then summarize the papers in this special issue according to three unifying themes (1) economic freedom studies; (2) institutions and long-run growth, and (3) well-being and institutions in transition economies. We conclude by discussing some challenges for future research.
Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor... more Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address this question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was decisively defeated three times due to a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP's own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave leaning constituencies.
Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their co... more Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising, allowing us to estimate the role of contagion in the spread of the riots. We find that local (rather than national) sources of information were central in driving contagion, and that this contagion magnified the impact that social and economic fundamentals had on riots by a factor of 2.65. Our historical data allow us to overcome a number of econometric challenges, but the Swing riots are of independent interest as well: they contributed to the passage of the Great Reform Act, a key step in Britain's institutional development.
In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national bor... more In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external economic and political costs, foreign state and non-state actors have an interest in influencing policy actions in other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities and takes many forms. We distinguish three broad types of intervention strategies, (i) voluntary agreement interventions between the intervening foreign power and the target country, (ii) policy interventions based on rewarding or sanctioning the target country to obtain a specific change in policy and (iii) institution interventions aimed at influencing the policy choice by changing the political institutions in the target country (with or without a civil war). We propose a unifying theoretical framework to understand when and which form of foreign influence is chosen and use it to organize and evaluate the new political economics literature on foreign influence along with work in cognate disciplines. Foreign intervention plays a more important role for a proper understanding of domestic policy choices, for institutional dynamics and for internal conflict than is commonly acknowledged in both empirical and theoretical research.
The Redistribution Hypothesis predicts that franchise extension causes an increase in state-spons... more The Redistribution Hypothesis predicts that franchise extension causes an increase in state-sponsored redistribution. We test this hypothesis by considering the relationship between franchise extension and selected aspects of fiscal structure at both central and local government levels in the UK from 1820 to 1913. We do so without imposing a priori restrictions on the direction of causality using a novel method for causal investigation of non-experimental data proposed by Hoover (2001). This method is based on tests for structural breaks in the conditional and marginal distributions of the franchise and fiscal structure time series preceded by a detailed historical narrative analysis. We do not find compelling evidence supporting the Redistribution Hypothesis.
In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national bor... more In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external economic and political costs, foreign state and non-state actors have an interest in influencing policy actions in other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities and takes three principal forms: (i) voluntary agreements, (ii) policy interventions based on rewarding or sanctioning the target country to obtain a specific change in policy, and (iii) institution interventions aimed at influencing the political institutions in the target country. We propose a unifying theoretical framework to study when foreign influence is chosen and in which form, and use it to organize and evaluate the new political economics literature on foreign influence along with work in cognate disciplines (JEL D72, D74, F51, F53, P26, P33).
Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor... more Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address that question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was defeated decisively three times following a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP’s own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave-leaning constituencies.
The Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on... more The Great Reform Act of 1832 was a watershed for democracy in Great Britain. We study the vote on 22 March 1831 in the House of Commons to test three competing theories of democratization: public opinion, political expedience, and threat of revolution. Peaceful agitation and mass-support for reform played an important role. Political expedience also motivated some members of Parliament to support the reform, especially if they were elected in constituencies located in counties that would gain seats. Violent unrest in urban but not in rural areas had some influence on the members of Parliament. Counterfactual scenarios suggest that the reform bill would not have obtained a majority in the House of Commons in the absence of these factors.
We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves toward democracy in ... more We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves toward democracy in sub-Saharan Africa and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact on democratic change and supports the “window of opportunity” hypothesis: droughts lead to an increase in the threat of conflict, and incumbents often respond by making democratic concessions.
This paper tests the hypothesis that the threat of revolution caused the elite to extend the voti... more This paper tests the hypothesis that the threat of revolution caused the elite to extend the voting franchise, as suggested by Acemoglu and Robinson [Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, 1167-1199, 2000]. We propose new measures of the threat of revolution and estimate the relationship between these and measures of su¤rage reform on a sample of 12 western European countries covering the period from 1820 to 1938. We …nd strong support for the "threat of revolution hypothesis". We also …nd some evidence that war mattered for the extension of the franchise, whereas modernization theory receives little support.
Does local democracy help or hinder the solution of collective action problems? We study this que... more Does local democracy help or hinder the solution of collective action problems? We study this question in the context of public spending on health-related urban amenities in a panel of 75 municipal boroughs in England and Wales in 1868, 1871 and 1886. We …nd evidence of a U-shaped relationship between spending on urban amenities and the extension of the local voting franchise. We argue that this retrenchment e¤ect arose because middle class taxpayers were unwilling to pay the cost of poor sanitation and the urban elites, elected on a narrow franchise, were instrumental for sanitary improvements. Our model of taxpayer democracy suggests that the retrenchment e¤ect is related to forced enfranchisement of the middle class through nationwide reforms.
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