Center for the Study of Democracy

I analyze the effect of inequality on growth over different time-frames. In a large cross-country dataset for the period 1950-2007 I find evidence of a short-run (5-year periods) and medium-run (10-year periods) inverse-U relationship between inequality and growth. In the long-run (20-year periods), however, inequality has a negative effect on growth in poor countries, and a positive effect in rich ones. Finally, in the 37-year period (1970-2007) higher inequality is associated with a lower rate of growth. Thus, while some (but not much) inequality is good for growth, the negative effect of inequality on growth becomes dominant over longer time-frames.

Using a new dataset of Italian publicly traded companies between 1994 and 2008, this paper aims to quantify the value of different types of political connections. Conducting an event study on stock returns, we examine how the stocks of connected companies perform before and after the politicians to whom they are connected are either elected to Parliament, or appointed as government ministers. First, we check whether political connections in general lead to abnormally positive returns. Then, we ask whether political connections have a different effect on stock returns, depending on whether companies have politicians themselves (direct connection) or some of their relatives (indirect connection) among their administrators. Finally, we test the hypothesis that connections are effective only when the politicians are members of the governing coalition. Contrary to most studies, political connections are not always associated with positive stock returns. Taking stock performance as a proxy for the benefits of connections, we conclude that only certain political connections are in fact valuable to companies. Being connected with the (future) governing coalition has the predicted positive effect, whereas gaining or maintaining a connection with the opposition coalition has no effect, or even a negative effect. Also, only indirect connections are found to increase the company’s value, while direct connections are not. However, given the size and composition of our sample, we cannot confidently conclude that indirect connections do differ from direct ones.

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on democratization by examining the media’s causal relationship to political liberalization. First, I briefly review the major theoretical research regarding democratization and the media. I then provide an account of why media freedom contributes to democratic development. Specifically, I highlight two causal mechanisms, The Civil Society Function and The Opposition Function. The Civil Society Function, most often carried out in the print media, describes the media’s role in facilitating a public sphere in which elites can communicate. In contrast, in accordance with The Opposition Function, the media furthers political liberalization by increasing the public’s awareness of alternative political candidates. Because of its vast distribution, the broadcast media best performs The Opposition Function. The case of Mexico is examined to provide a concrete illustration of each of these functions of the media in relation to democratization. In the third section, I show the explanatory ability of the media on democratization, tested empirically against competing conventional explanations of democratization. To do so, I use the ordinary least squares method on time-series cross-sectional data of 200 countries measured annually from 1980-2004. The data and methods are described, as are the empirical findings and their theoretical implications.

Both major contenders in Peru’s 1931 presidential contest made populist mobilization a centerpiece of their political strategies. Never before had a candidate for national office so completely flouted traditional channels of political power and so thoroughly staked his political aspirations on the mobilization of support from non-elite segments of the population. This paper asks: Why did these two candidates pursue novel populist strategies at this particular historical juncture? The first part of the paper identifies the conditions that encouraged Peruvian politicians to pursue populist mobilization in 1931; it also explains why populist mobilization had never before been undertaken in Peru. An adequate explanation of populist mobilization, however, must also trace the social processes by which objective conditions translate into the selection of specific lines of action by political leaders. The second part of this paper thus assesses the socially-conditioned strategic vision of the various political actors operating in 1931. Only by adding this second step to the inquiry is it possible to answer the question of why, if all encountered the same objective conditions, some actors in the political field pursued populist strategies while others did not. Ultimately, I identify two paths to populist mobilization: an ideological route and an accidental route. Other political actors chose not to pursue populist mobilization for one of two reasons: some saw it as going too far in undermining the elite bases of the traditional political structure; others saw it as not going far enough toward fostering revolutionary change.

The paper traces the historical unfolding of the Islamization strategy during Mubarak’s reign. It examines and compares the practices constituting this strategy and the State’s reaction to it. The relational approach adopted in this study gives weight to structured agency through analyzing how ideational and organizational levels interact. It evaluates the political efficacy of counter-hegemony as a political strategy, bringing to the forefront its practical, as well as its theoretical limitations.

Despite its conceptual centrality to research in comparative politics and the fact that a single measure—the Laakso-Taagepera index (LT)—is nearly universally employed in empirical research, the question of what is the best way to “count” parties is still an open one. Among other alleged shortcomings, LT has been criticized for over-weighting small parties, especially in the case of a one-party majority. Using seat-shares data from over 300 elections, I have calculated LT as well as an alternative measure (BZ) which employs normalized Banzhaf scores rather than simple party seat shares, as weights. The Banzhaf index is a voting power index which calculates a party’s voting power as a function of its coalitional potential. Though the two measures are highly correlated, I identify three particular party constellations in which the differences between LT and BZ are systematic and statistically significant. In all of these cases, and especially in the case of a one-party majority, I argue that BZ is a more accurate representation of the actual party system, after any given election, while LT is perhaps better interpreted as a measure of the shape of the party system more generally. These findings have many implications, including with respect to the categorization of party systems and the empirical validity of Duverger’s Law.

I develop the theory of power laws and allude to their prevalence elsewhere in the scientific world. I use actual data on US special interest groups to identify a broad, empirical regularity in the distribution of their lobbying expenditures, which naturally gives rise to a spatial model of the lobbying process. I discuss the policy implications of these findings and stress the superiority of this approach in describing aggregate special interest behavior relative to the stylized, strategic workhorse models in this field. Supplemental mathematical background is provided in two appendices.

This research analyzes institutions of governance because institutions can constrain or augment the preferences of decision-makers. The objective of this study is to model an important class of regional institutions, namely metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). MPOs are responsible for implementing United States Federal transportation policy at the local level in all areas with a population of 50,000 or more. The primary mission of the MPO is to engage in transportation planning to meet requirements for the receipt of federal funds that number in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

We adopt a definition of state capacity that focuses on policy implementation and propose to measure the construct by examining the proportion of total tax revenue from income taxes. We make three major contributions in this paper. First, unlike other scholars, we focus explicitly on income tax collection rather than looking at overall tax collection. Second, we demonstrate the construct validity of our measure. Third, we compare our measure to the most commonly used indicator for state capacity, tax/GDP, to demonstrate the construct validity of that measure and how ours performs better for our large sample of cases.