Ellis Goldberg

Lessons from Strange Cases Democracy, Development, and the Resource Curse in the U.S. States

The work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under-development suffers from several shortcomings. In this article, the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting. Using a new data set for the U.S. states spanning 73 years and case studies of Texas and Louisiana, the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has. They provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth, poorer developmental performance, and less competitive politics. Using this empirical setting, they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development. They draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross-national and cross-state work.

Peasants in Revolt: Egypt 1919

From March until late April 1919 Egypt suffered one of the great peasant revolts of her history and of the 20th century. 1 Contemporaries viewed it as having international importance because it was the result of thirty years of European domination, and its resolution would be likely to affect all Western colonial empires. 2 For us, it marks the emergence of Egyptian liberalism and the construction of the modern state. 3 . The insurrection began when four leaders of the Egyptian national movement were arrested on 9 March 1919. They were then exiled to Malta for insisting that the Egyptian delegation ( wafd ) to the Versailles Conference be recognized, so that it could demand that Egypt be accepted as an independent national state.

After the Revolution: Sovereign Respect and the Rule of Law in Egypt

During the fijirst six months of 2011 many of the institutions of the Egyptian republic collapsed under the pressure of massive street demonstrations and along with them the authority of the state disappeared. In many areas there was a widespread sense that, along with the institutions of the state, public order had collapsed. As of this writing there remain acute fears in the country that, without the police power of the state, public order remains threatened. As Egyptians struggle with the process of creating a second republic, stark challenges confront the legal system in the coming year as institutions and authority are reconstituted. A paradox is that the judicial system appears to be the branch of Egyptian government the public least wants to experience signifijicant institutional change even as profound questions about the rule of law, the role of the courts, and the nature of government authority emerge. In this article we argue that two distinct concepts of government and its relationship to law now are in play in contemporary Egypt—the rule of law and state authority or sovereignty. We further argue that the politics of the country over the next decade will be shaped by the importance various actors—the military, political parties, and ordinary citizens—ascribe to these concepts in the reconstruction of the state. Given the prominence of new political forces including the Nour (a Salafiji) party and the Muslim Brothers’ Freedom and Justice party that will play some role in the writing the constitution of the new state these questions are unresolved, consequential and likely to be subject to signifijicant conflict. In the past, small groups of intellectuals and experts drafted constitutions. This was true of the Committee of Thirty that wrote the 1923 constitution and of the Committee of 50 that proposed the 1954 constitution as well as the group that wrote the 1971 constitution which the armed forces replaced in 2011 with their constitutional declaration whose provenance is unknown. This time will be diffferent. A committee of 100 to be chosen, if the constitutional declaration is followed, by a freely elected parliament will undertake the task of drafting the new constitutional document which will then by presented to a national referendum. Acute as these issues are in Egypt in 2011 and 2012, they are not novel. Egyptians have discussed them since the beginning of the 20th century and partial resolutions can be seen in diffferent institutional confijigurations from the late monarchical era to the present. To understand the ongoing conflict in Egyptian political life between authoritarian and democratic approaches to the role of the state, we begin with

Mobilizing Coal for War: The Rise and Decline of English Socialism

Far from being the wave of the future, European socialism was primarily a defensive strategy for workers in the basic industries of the early 20th century. This is especially obvious in the history of the British Labour party. Workers in British coal mines benefited from free trade before WWI and were profoundly threatened by it after the war. Labour socialism was a strategy to prevent the collapse of the British mining industry that succeeded from 1918 until the hollowed out sector was finally destroyed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The miners were at the center of a coalition that included steel and rail workers. Its greatest threat to the British state was in 1926 and its greatest victory was in 1946 but by 1971 it was no longer politically viable.