Carles Boix

Social Capital: Explaining Its Origins and Effects on Government Performance

With the rise of analytical or positive approaches to the study of politics over the last three decades, the collective action problem has emerged as one of the central concepts in political science. The concepts widespread acceptance as a descriptive and diagnostic tool, however, cannot obscure the fact that its predictions do not always hold. Co-operation sometimes does take place in contexts where, according to the theory, actors should have little incentive to engage in it.

Trade, Democracy, and the Size of the Public Sector: The Political Underpinnings of Openness

Politics remains prominently absent in the literature showing that higher levels of trade integration lead to a larger public sector. As openness increases, the state, acting as a social planner, adopts a salient role to minimize the risks of economic integration and secure social peace. Given the highly redistributive nature of both trade and fiscal policies, we claim, however, that the interaction of the international economy and domestic politics leads to three distinct political-economic equilibria. First, nations may embrace protectionist policies to shore up the welfare of key domestic sectorsÑwithout engaging, therefore, in substantial public spending. Second, to maintain trade openness in democracies, policymakers develop compensation policies to muster the support of the losers of openness. Finally, given the tax burden of public compensation, pro-free trade sectors may impose an authoritarian regime to exclude (instead of buying off) their opponents. After formally stating the conditions under which each regime emerges, we test the model on a panel data of around sixty-five developing and developed nations in the period 1950Ð1990 and explore its implications through a set of key historical cases drawn from the last two centuries.

The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions and Power-Sharing in Dictatorships

Why do some dictatorships establish institutions that are typically associated with democracy, such as legislatures or political parties? We propose a new theoretical model of institutions and power-sharing in dictatorships. We argue that by facilitating power-sharing, political institutions promote the survival of dictatorships. However, authoritarian power-sharing through institutions is feasible only when it is backed by the crude but credible threat of a rebellion by the dictator’s allies. Whereas the allies’ political opportunities – rather than their focal coordination of beliefs – determine the credibility of the threat of a rebellion, institutions alleviate the commitment and monitoring problems that stem from the secrecy in authoritarian governance. We use both historical and large-N data to assess these new predictions about the relationship between political institutions, dictator tenure, and the concentration of power in dictatorships. ∗We would like to thank Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Frances Rosenbluth, Bonnie Weir, the participants at seminars and conferences at Princeton, Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the APSA, IPES, ISA and MPSA annual conventions for helpful comments and Aya Kachi for research assistance. †Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Email: cboix@princeton.edu. ‡Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Email: msvolik@uiuc.edu.

A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007:

This article updates and describes a widely used data set on democracy. Covering 1800–2007 and 219 countries, it represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently available. We argue that our measure’s distinguishing features—a concrete, dichotomous coding and a long time span—are of critical value to empirical work on democracy. Inspired by Robert Dahl, we define a country as democratic if it satisfies conditions for both contestation and participation. Specifically, democracies feature political leaders chosen through free and fair elections and satisfy a threshold value of suffrage. After comparing our coding to that of other popular measures, we illustrate how democracy’s predictive factors have evolved since 1800. In particular, we show that economic modernization variables have steadily declined in their correlation with democracy over time.

Democracy, Development, and the International System

Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations. The estimations hold after I control for country and time effects and instrument for income. Results reveal that the effect of income varies across income levels and across eras. First, income has a decreasing marginal effect on democratization. In already developed (and democratized) countries, any extra growth has no further effect on the level of democracy. Second, the structure of the international system affects the resources and strategies of pro-authoritarian and pro-democratic factions in client states. The proportion of liberal democracies peaks under international orders governed by democratic hegemons, such as the post–Cold War period, and bottoms out when authoritarian great powers such as the Holy Alliance control the world system.

Partisan Governments, the International Economy, and Macroeconomic Policies in Advanced Nations, 1960-93

This article examines the impact of parties, domestic institutions, and the international economy on the conduct of monetary and fiscal policies using time-series cross-section data from nineteen oecd countries for the years between 1960 and the mid-1990s. The results are as follows. Partisan governments have affected, alone and in interaction with the organization of labor markets, the pattern of macroeconomic management. Still, their impact has varied over time, partly as a function of economic conditions but fundamentally as a function of the degree of financial liberalization and the exchange-rate system in place. After following broadly similar macroeconomic policies in the 1960s, oecd governments pursued divergent monetary and fiscal policies in response to the economic slowdown of the 1970s. Even when they initially adopted countercyclical measures, conservative governments quickly favored tight monetary policies and strove to achieve fiscal discipline. By contrast, taking advantage of generalized capital controls and floating exchange rates, socialist cabinets embraced demand management policies in a systematic fashion--mostly through budget deficits in corporatist countries and through both loose monetary and loose fiscal measures in noncorporatist settings. As financial liberalization progressed in the early 1980s, partisan- and institution-led differences in macroeconomic policies waned across countries.

Privatizing the Public Business Sector in the Eighties: Economic Performance, Partisan Responses and Divided Governments

From the late 1970s on, after several decades characterized by relatively interventionist patterns of economic policy making, most advanced states began questioning and, in some instances, abandoning active industrial policies and privatizing public businesses. Examining the evolution of the public business sector in all nations included in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1979 to 1993, this article shows that the sale of public firms did not mechanically derive from either declining growth rates, growing budget deficits or the increasing internationalization of domestic economies. Although the economic slowdown of the 1970s had the effect of breaking down the so-called Keynesian post-war consensus, the strategies towards the public business sector eventually adopted were shaped by the partisan composition of office – conservatives privatized while social democrats opted for the status quo – and by the internal structure of the cabinet – divided governments produced little change in either direction. From a theoretical point of view, this analysis broadens the current political-economic literature by showing that, although parties have a limited impact on the standard macroeconomic policies employed to manage the business cycle – a point widely confirmed in the literature – they do play a central role in designing policies, such as the level of public ownership of the business sector, that shape the supply side of the economy.

Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World

To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally, this article offers an integrated analytical model that considers both the motives and the opportunities of states and rebels. Civil wars, guerrillas, and revolutionary outbreaks are seen as a result of the nature and distribution of wealth in each country. Systematic and organized violent conflicts are most likely in economies where inequality is high and wealth is mostly immobile, that is, in societies where those worse off would benefit substantially from expropriating all assets. Violence is conditional on the mobilizational and organizational capacity of challengers and on the state capacity to control its territory. The theory is tested on data on civil wars from 1850 to 1999 for the whole world and on data on guerrilla warfare and revolutionary episodes spanning the years from 1919 to 1997 across all countries.

Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality

A growing literature in politics and economics employs measures of the height and health condition of human beings to gauge the level of well-being and income across societies and over time. We use both archeological data of skeletal remains and actual records of heights (collected by armies, anthropologists) to measure the degree of variance in the distribution of heights, and therefore, the degree of inequality since prehistoric times. We find that the type of economy and the type of political institutions strongly covary with our measures of inequality.

Must we choose? European unemployment, American inequality, and the impact of education and labor market institutions

In the last fifteen years two equilibria have arisen in the advaced world. On the one hand, wage dispersion has widened in those countries where unemployment has remained low (with cyclical variation). On the other hand, wherever income inequality has remained unchaged, unemployment has shot upwards. To account for there distinct patterns, a combination of current theories - focusing separately on either technological and trade shocks or institutional arrangements - is required.