WARS AND STATE CAPACITY Besley, Timothy; Persson, Torsten
Journal of the European Economic Association,
April‐May 2008, Volume:
6, Issue:
2-3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The article builds a simple model to investigate how different types of armed conflict shape fiscal capacity: the state's ability to raise revenue from taxes. It starts from the simple observation ...that external war tends to generate common interests across groups in society, whereas internal, civil war entails deep conflicting interests across groups. Our model predicts that—compared to a society without conflict—civil wars lead to smaller investments in fiscal capacity, whereas prospects of external war generally lead to larger investments. Correlations in international data on conflicts and taxation are, by and large, consistent with these predictions.
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What do we really mean when we say a political party has changed? And exactly what is it that drives that change? Political scientists working in the comparative tradition have come up with a general ...explanation that revolves around the role of election defeats and loss of office, and around changes of leader and factions. But how well does that explanation cope when subjected to a historically-grounded and therefore robust examination? This book attempts to answer that question by subjecting the common wisdom to a real-world, over-time test using half a century in the life of one of the world’s oldest and most successful political parties to provide a series of in-depth case studies. What do the periods spent in both opposition and government by the British Conservatives since 1945 tell us about what drives parties to change their sales-force, the way they organise, and the policies they come up with? Using internal papers, memos and minutes of meetings from party archives, along with historical and contemporary accounts, memoirs and interviews, this book maps the extent of change and then explores what may have driven it. The conventional wisdom, it turns out, is not necessarily wrong but incomplete, requiring both qualification and supplementation. This approachably-written book suggests when, how and why.
This book examines the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how the territory fit unusually within Britain’s decolonisation narratives and ...served as an occasional foil for examining Britain’s own culture during a period of perceived stagnation and decline. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published primary sources, Hong Kong and British culture, 1945–97 investigates such themes as Hong Kong as a site of unrestrained capitalism, modernisation, and good government, as well as an arena of male social and sexual opportunity. It also examines the ways in which Hong Kong Chinese embraced British culture, and the competing predictions that British observers made concerning the colony’s return to Chinese sovereignty. An epilogue considers the enduring legacy of British colonialism. This book will be essential reading for historians of Hong Kong, British decolonisation, and Britain’s culture of declinism.
Kathleen Paul challenges the usual explanation for the racism of post-war British policy. According to standard historiography, British public opinion forced the Conservative government to introduce ...legislation stemming the flow of dark-skinned immigrants and thereby altering an expansive nationality policy that had previously allowed all British subjects free entry into the United Kingdom. Paul's extensive archival research shows, however, that the racism of ministers and senior functionaries led rather than followed public opinion. In the late 1940s, the Labour government faced a birthrate perceived to be in decline, massive economic dislocations caused by the war, a huge national debt, severe labor shortages, and the prospective loss of international preeminence. Simultaneously, it subsidized the emigration of Britons to Australia, Canada, and other parts of the Empire, recruited Irish citizens and European refugees to work in Britain, and used regulatory changes to dissuade British subjects of color from coming to the United Kingdom. Paul contends post-war concepts of citizenship were based on a contradiction between the formal definition of who had the right to enter Britain and the informal notion of who was, or could become, really British. Whitewashing Britain extends this analysis to contemporary issues, such as the fierce engagement in the Falklands War and the curtailment of citizenship options for residents of Hong Kong. Paul finds the politics of citizenship in contemporary Britain still haunted by a mixture of imperial, economic, and demographic imperatives.
Models of government formation processes in multi-party democracies are usually highly sensitive to the rules that govern the selection of formateurs (i.e. the parties selected to propose a potential ...government). The theoretical literature has focused on two selection rules: selection proportional to seat share, and selection in order of seat share. In this paper, we use a new data set on government formations in 11 parliamentary democracies to empirically assess which selection rule most closely approximates the data. We find that while there is little empirical support for selection in order of seat share, proportional selection fits the data well. However, we also find that a simple alternative that combines the insights of the two selection rules outperforms both of them in their ability to explain the data.
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In July 1997, Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony, five million people lost their status as British subjects. It was always clear that the last five years of British rule would be fraught with ...uncertainty. Dimbleby examines the crisis.
Hong Kong's Watershed: The 1967 Riots is the first English book that provides an account and critical analysis of the disturbances based on declassified files from the British government and ...recollection by key players during the events. The interviews wi
Despite their magnitude and potential impact, federal R&D expenditures outside of research universities have attracted little economic scrutiny. We examine the initiatives since 1980 to encourage ...patenting and technology transfer at the national laboratories. Both field and empirical research challenges the conventional picture of bleak failure. The policy changes had a substantial impact on the laboratories' patenting: they have gradually reached parity in patents per R&D dollar with research universities. Unlike universities, laboratory patent quality has remained constant or even increased despite this growth. Success is associated with avoiding technological diversification and with having a university as lab manager.
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In No Turning Back, Paul Addison takes the long view, charting the vastly changing character of British society since the end of the Second World War. As he shows, in this period a series of peaceful ...revolutions has completely transformed the country so that, with the advantage of a longer perspective, the comparative peace and growing prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century appear as more powerful solvents of settled ways of life than the Battle of the Sommeor the Blitz. We have come to take for granted a welfare state which would have seemed extraordinary to our forebears in the first decades of the century, based upon the achievement of a hitherto undreamed of mass prosperity. Much of the sexual morality preached if not practised for centuries has been dismantled with the creation of a 'permissive society'. The employment and career chances of women have been revolutionized. A white nation has been transformed into a multiracial one. An economy founded onmanufacturing under the watchful eye of the 'gentlemen in Whitehall' has morphed into a free market system, heavily dependent on finance, services, and housing, while a predominantly working class society has evolved into a predominantly middle class one. And the United Kingdom, which once looked assolid as the rock of Gibraltar, now looks increasingly fragile, as Wales and especially Scotland have started to go their separate ways.The book ends with an assessment of the gains and losses that have resulted. As this makes clear, this is not a story of progress pure and simple, it is a story of fundamental transformation in which much has been gained and much also lost, perhaps above all a sense of the ties that used to bind people together. Paul Addison brings to it the personal point of view of someone who has lived through it all and seen the Britain of his youth turn into a
very different country, but who in the finalreckoning still prefers the present to the past.
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