Violence and the rise of open-access orders

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 55-68

  North, Douglass C ^a   Wallis, John Joseph ^b   Weingast, Barry R ^c  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

^c STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67651230070     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. The growing literature on authoritarian elections emphasizes this point. See Beatriz Magaloni, "Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule," Comparative Political Studies 41 (April 2008): 715-41.
2. In Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1959), Seymour Martin Lipset asked why sustainable democracy seemed to require economic development. Whether a causal link exists between democracy and economic development, and if so which way the link runs, remains an open question. See more recent work, including Adam Przeworksi et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
3. Robert J. Barro, Markets and Choices in a Free Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996);
4. and Daron Acemoglu et al., "Income and Democracy," American Economic Review 98 (June 2008): 808-42.
5. For evidence about long-term growth before 1800, see Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
6. see also Robert W. Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20-22.
7. Since we have no reliable way of gauging annual per capita income before 1800, the idea that the recent growth in developed countries is due to the elimination of negativegrowth episodes remains an assertion, but one that accords with evidence about economic performance in the past.
8. The following discussion summarizes the analysis of Table 1.2 in Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 1.
9. More sophisticated empirical confirmation is provided by Dani Rodrik, Making Openness Work: The New Global Economy and the Developing Countries (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1999);
10. Garey Ramey and Valerie A. Ramey, "Cross-Country Evidence on the Link Between Volatility and Growth," American Economic Review 85 (December 1995): 1138-51;
11. and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, "Democracy, Volatility and Development," Review of Economics and Statistics 87 (May 2005): 348-61.
12. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3-4.
13. See Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
14. and Barry R. Weingast, "Rational Choice Institutionalism," in Ira Katznelson and Helen V. Milner, eds., Political Science, State of the Discipline: Reconsidering Power, Choice, and the State (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).
15. Margaret Levi, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
16. Three well-known examples are Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan's notion of the state as Leviathan, Douglass C. North's neoclassical theory of the state, and Mancur Olson's idea of the state as a stationary bandit. Other models include Douglass C. North, 68 Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981);
17. Yoram Barzel, A Theory of the State: Economic Rights, Legal Rights, and the Scope of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
18. Robert Bates, Avner Greif, and Smita Singh, "Organizing Violence," Journal of Conflict Resolution (October 2002): 1-65;
19. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003);
20. and Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992).
21. A rent is a return to an economic asset that exceeds the return which the asset can receive in its best alternative use. If a person is only willing to work at a particular job for $10 an hour, but not for $9.99 an hour, and is paid $15 an hour, she receives a rent of $5 an hour. Importantly, rents can be created or increased by limited access-for example, when the state grants an individual monopoly privileges over an activity.
22. Although organizations such as corporations require state approval, open entry occurs when the state approves one for any group that meets a minimal set of requirements.
23. A perpetually lived organization is not infinitely lived, but an organization whose existence is independent of the lives of its members. For example, a modern corporation is a perpetually lived organization. Because a modern partnership must be reorganized on the death of a partner, it is not perpetually lived.
24. For a sophisticated discussion of rent creation, see Mushtaq H. Khan and Kwame Sundaram Jomo, Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theory and Evidence in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
25. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960);
26. Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
27. William H. Riker, Liberalism Against Populism: A Confrontation Between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982).
28. For an example of this approach, which stresses how elites, threatened by revolution or civil unrest, grant nonelites concessions such as democracy, see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
29. We deal with several of these issues in Violence and Social Orders, ch. 7.
30. Przeworski, et al., Democracy and Development.
31. Alberto Diaz, Beatriz Magaloni, and Barry R. Weingast, "Tragic Brilliance: Equilibrium Party Hegemony in Mexico," Working Paper, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, 2008. The authors analyze this use of elections as a means of exerting control over citizens.
32. The classic work is Allan H. Meltzer and Scott F. Richard, "A Rational Theory of the Size of Government," Journal of Political Economy 89 (October 1981): 914-27.
33. See also Acemoglu and Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
34. Geoffrey Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5, makes a similar point.
35. Moreover, as the term "social-insurance programs" suggests, these policies are more about insurance than about redistribution. See Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth Since the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2004).