Can Historical Institutionalism be Applied to Political Regime Development in Africa?

Historical institutionalism has been used to explain the emergence of democracy and dictatorship in various regions of the world, but not applied to political development in Africa. Based on the recently refined concepts of historical institutionalism, the aim of this study is to provide a framework for the analysis of the various regime types that have been established in Africa during the last two decades: democratic, hybrid and authoritarian. Surprisingly little effort has been dedicated to a historically grounded explanation of these regime types. Against a common claim that African politics is mainly driven by informal institutions or behaviours, we argue that an institution-based examination of African politics is justified. We then provide a proposition of how to link up concepts of historical institutionalism with empirical cases in Africa, within a comparative approach. Our proposition for tracing specific development paths will not be based on the regimes as a 'whole', but on the deconstruction of a political regime into partial regimes and subsequently into selected formal and informal institutions. This will allow for an empirical analysis of the different components of a regime over long periods of time, and thus for path-dependent analyses of regime development

Bushway, presented at Symposium on the Past and Future of Empirical Sentencing

Brian Forst and Shawn Bushway have done an excellent job of bringing together perspectives from various disciplines on discretion in criminal sentencing. That itself is a great service, and there is much that I agree with. What I will attempt to do in my comments is to continue building a more complete picture of the role discretion plays in the criminal justice system from my own slightly different disciplinary perspective of law and economics. First, I will fill out some of the picture of theoretical economic work provided by the authors. The most important theoretical contributions by economists in the area of crime have been on the costs and benefits of incarceration. However, to my knowledge none of that work has incorporated judicial discretion, prosecutorial discretion, or sentencing guidelines even though they are of obvious relevance to deterrence and incapacitation. I argue that we have learned some important lessons on sentencing from theoretical work, but that more work can be done because prior forays do not adequately reflect the institutional picture. Second, I will discuss briefly the challenge of reducing and measuring “unwarranted disparity ” in sentencing. Reducing disparity was an important goal of the state and federal Guidelines, and there are substantial challenges to actually identifying the magnitude of unwarranted disparity and the success of the Guidelines in mitigating it