Reinvestigating the Reciprocal Relationship between Democracy and Income Inequality

Few social science relationships have spawned as much interest -- or as many elaborate theoretical models and arguments -- as that between democracy and income inequality. However, the empirical literature has generally employed statistical models based on problematic assumptions, and has produced quite mixed results. Hence, this paper makes an important empirical contribution by applying models that, for instance, account for endogeneity biases and control for country-specific effects. Despite being correlated, there is very little evidence of any effect of income inequality on level of democracy once employing appropriate model specifications. Furthermore, there is no robust evidence that inequality systematically affects either democratization prospects or democratic stability. In contrast, there is evidence that democracy reduces income inequality when inequality is proxied by share of income going to wages. However, also this effect is sensitive to choice of inequality measure. Democracy does, for instance, not reduce inequalities in disposable household incomes

Autocrats and Skyscrapers: Modern White Elephants in Dictatorships

Political leaders often have private incentives to pursue expensive and socially wasteful "white elephant" projects. Our argument highlights that weak accountability mechanisms allow autocratic leaders to more easily realize such projects, whereas democratic leaders are more constrained from doing so. We subsequently test different implications from this argument by drawing on a global dataset recording various features of skyscrapers, a prominent type of modern white elephant. We find that autocracies systematically build more new skyscrapers than democracies, and this result is robust to controlling for income level, state control over the economy, and country- and year-fixed effects. Further, autocratic skyscrapers are more excessive and wasteful than democratic. Autocratic regimes also pursue skyscraper projects no matter if they preside over rural or urban societies. In contrast, skyscrapers are fewer and - when first built - associated with less waste in democracies, and they are more frequently built urbanized democracies than in rural

Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Assessing Democratic Backsliding

During the past decade, analyses drawing on several democracy measures have shown a global trend of democratic retrenchment. While these democracy measures use radically different methodologies, most partially or fully rely on subjective judgments to produce estimates of the level of democracy within states. Such projects continuously grapple with balancing conceptual coverage with the potential for bias (Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Przeworski et al. 2000). Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) reintroduce this debate, arguing that “objective” measures of democracy show little evidence of recent global democratic backsliding.1 By extension, they posit that time-varying expert bias drives the appearance of democratic retrenchment in measures that incorporate expert judgments. In this article, we engage with (1) broader debates on democracy measurement and democratic backsliding, and (2) L&M’s specific data and conclusions

Acute mountain sickness.

Acute mountain sickness (AMS) is a clinical syndrome occurring in otherwise healthy normal individuals who ascend rapidly to high altitude. Symptoms develop over a period ofa few hours or days. The usual symptoms include headache, anorexia, nausea, vomiting, lethargy, unsteadiness of gait, undue dyspnoea on moderate exertion and interrupted sleep. AMS is unrelated to physical fitness, sex or age except that young children over two years of age are unduly susceptible. One of the striking features ofAMS is the wide variation in individual susceptibility which is to some extent consistent. Some subjects never experience symptoms at any altitude while others have repeated attacks on ascending to quite modest altitudes. Rapid ascent to altitudes of 2500 to 3000m will produce symptoms in some subjects while after ascent over 23 days to 5000m most subjects will be affected, some to a marked degree. In general, the more rapid the ascent, the higher the altitude reached and the greater the physical exertion involved, the more severe AMS will be. Ifthe subjects stay at the altitude reached there is a tendency for acclimatization to occur and symptoms to remit over 1-7 days

The Business Case for Democracy

I present a business case for democracy, focusing on the impact of democracy on economic growth. This relationship is widely studied, and results are less clear for growth than many other development outcomes such as literacy or infant mortality. I discuss four factors pertaining to data quality and modelling choices, suggesting that several previous studies have underestimated the growth-benefits of democracy. I also discuss the relationship between democracy and economic crises and variation in economic performance. By mitigating abysmal economic outcomes and ensuring more stable performance, democracy is generally of benefit to risk-averse entrepreneurs, investors, workers, and consumers alike

Party Institutionalization and Welfare State Development

We propose that the extent to which political parties are institutionalized shapes welfare state development. Institutionalized parties allow politicians to overcome coordination problems, avoid capture by special interests, and form stable linkages with broad social groups. These features both enable and incentivize politicians to pursue generous and universal welfare policies. Employing recent measures of party institutionalization and welfare law features, we test implications from our argument on data covering 169 countries and extending back to 1900. Even when accounting for country- and year-fixed effects and institutional features such as electoral system, regime type and state capacity, we find robust evidence that party institutionalization leads to more extensive, universal, and generous welfare arrangements. The relationship is more pronounced in democracies, but exists also in autocracies. When disaggregating party institutionalization and evaluating mechanisms, the linkages that institutionalized parties form with social groups constitute one important, but not the only relevant, factor.We would like to thank Svend-Erik Skaaning, Francesc Armat, Kalle Moene, Lars Svåsand, Georg Picot, Henning Finseraas, Bjørn Høyland, Johannes Lindvall, Haakon Gjerløw, Anders Sundell, Carsten Jensen, Andreas Kotsadam, Tore Wig, Sirianne Dahlum, and attendees at the Conference for Global Challenges – Nordic Experiences, University of Oslo, 21 March 2017, at SAMPOL institutional seminar, Department of Comparative Politics, Bergen University, 19 April 2017, the Carsten Jensen seminar, Institute for Social Research, Oslo and the American Political Association Annual Meeting 2017, San Francisco for very helpful comments and suggestions. This research project was funded by the Research Council Norway, “Young Research Talent” grant, pnr 240505, PI: Carl Henrik Knutsen. Rasmussen’s work was founded by the Research Council Norway “TREfF” grant, pnr 257603. Knutsen’s work on this research project was also supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Swede

Majoritarian systems, rural groups, and (arrested) welfare state development

While some scholars suggest that rural groups contribute to welfare state expansion, we highlight their incentives to restrain it. The ability of rural groups to achieve this preference hinges on their power resources, but also on the electoral system. We propose that in majoritarian systems, rural groups can often veto welfare legislation. In proportional systems this is less feasible, even for resource-rich groups. Instead, agrarian groups sometimes accept welfare legislation in return for other policy-concessions in post-electoral bargaining. We illustrate the argument with British and Norwegian historical experiences, and test the implications using panel data from 96 democracies. We find evidence that resourceful agrarian groups effectively arrest welfare state development in majoritarian systems, but not in proportional systems. As expected, the electoral system matters less for welfare state expansion when agrarian groups are weak. The results are robust to using alternative estimators, measures, samples and model specifications.Majoritarian systems, rural groups, and (arrested) welfare state developmentsubmittedVersio

Democracy and property rights : a theoretical and empirical analysis on the effects of political regime type on property rights arrangements

How does the type of political regime in a country affect the protection of property rights in that same country? In this study, political regime type is defined mainly along the dimension of degree of democracy. There exists no single, coherent theoretical framework that can give precise predictions on the answer to this general question. However, there exist several (par-tial) theories and models drawn from economics and political science that can give indica-tions on some of the mechanisms that might be at work. This study sums up five arguments on the potential effects of political regime type on property rights protection. Two of them relate to the general main research question above, and the three others are more specific in the sense that they try to outline interaction effects, the role of context, or further specify the political regime variable. No conclusive a priori prediction can be made on whether demo-cracies or authoritarian regimes protect property rights better in general, since different ar-guments point in different directions. One type of argument points to the opportunities for the relatively poor masses under democracy to grab and redistribute property from the weal-thy elites, whereas another type of argument points to the threat to property rights emanating from authoritarian rulers and their backers, when these are not checked by alternative power centers, democratic institutions (like elections) and democratically guaranteed civil liberties and political rights for the populace. However, other and more specified predictions can be drawn from theory when we identify nuances for example related to different actors identi-fied and involved, the specific nature of property rights alteration, different specifications of preferences for political elites and differences in socio-economic and political context. In the empirical part of the thesis, the different hypotheses deduced in the theoretical part are tested. A pooled cross country - panel approach is utilized, and data are collected from sev-eral different sources. Different operationalizations of both political regime type and proper-ty rights protection are used to check the robustness of results. In general, democracy is found to have an overall positive effect on the protection of property rights, and the esti-mated effect is relatively large. This claim is clearly supported when using OLS with Panel Corrected Standard Errors, and is also supported, albeit to a somewhat weaker degree, by Fixed-Effects analysis and Instrumental Variable analysis. When it comes to the IV analysis, I develop a new and very interesting instrument for political regime type, based on Samuel Huntington‟s observation that democratic regimes have come clustered in temporal waves, globally. I also test the more nuanced hypotheses developed in the theoretical section. A few examples of results from the empirical analysis are listed below: 1) The effect from a higher level of democracy on property rights seems to be non-linear, albeit always positive, with a larger effect for already relatively democratic countries. 2) A high degree of income inequality is detrimental to protection of property rights, but only in democracies. 3) Young democracies are worse at protecting property rights than older democracies 4) Parliamentary democracy is estimated to have a positive impact on property rights, when one compares it with presidential democracy. 5) Authoritarian rulers who expect to remain in power for a long time or who expects hereditary succession protects property rights relatively better than other authoritarian rulers. 6) There are large differences in property rights protection among different types of au-thoritarian regimes: Military regimes seem to be the worst and monarchies the best at provid-ing secure property rights. 7) Authoritarian rulers who face an internal security threat, for example a rebel move-ment or militia, protect property less well than those who mainly face an external security threat, for example a neighboring country and its army

Which Democracies Prosper? Electoral rules, form of government and economic growth

Publication based on research carried out in the framework of the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute.The journal issue has been produced in the framework of the PIREDEU Project, one of the projects carried out by the EUDO Public Opinion Observatory.Electoral rules and form of government have important economic effects, for example on taxation and public spending. However, there are no robust results in the literature when it comes to their effect on economic growth. This paper investigates whether electoral rules and form of government affects economic growth by applying panel data techniques on a very extensive dataset. There is no robust effect of presidentialism or parliamentarism on growth. However, there is very robust evidence for a positive, and quite substantial, effect of Proportional Representation (PR) electoral rules on economic growth. This is partly due to PR systems’ propensity to generate broad-interest policies, like universal education spending, property rights protection and free-trade, rather than special interest economic policies. Also semi-proportional systems seem to enhance growth relative to plural-majoritarian systems.1. Introduction 2. Literature review and arguments 3. Data and methodological issues 4. Empirical analysis 5. Conclusion Acknowledgements Appendix. Supplementary data Reference