► Institutionalized ruling parties discourage expropriatory behavior in autocracies. ► Autocracies with such parties can attract high levels of private investment. ► Institutionalization of the ...Chinese Communist Party encouraged private investment.
What explains private investment in autocracies, where institutions that discourage expropriation in democracies are absent? We argue that institutionalized ruling parties allow autocrats to make credible commitments to investors. Such parties promote investment by solving collective-action problems among a designated group, who invest with the expectation that the autocrat will not attempt their expropriation. We derive conditions under which autocrats want to create such parties, and we predict that private investment and governance will be stronger in their presence. We illustrate the model by examining the institutionalization of the Chinese Communist Party.
Despite the absence of formal institutions to constrain opportunistic behavior, some autocracies successfully attract private investment. Prior work explains such success by the relative size of the ...autocrat’s winning coalition or the existence of legislatures. We advance on this understanding by focusing on the key constraint limiting coalition size and legislative efficacy: organizational arrangements that allow group members to act collectively against the ruler. We introduce three new quantitative measures of the ability of ruling party members to act collectively: ruling-party institutionalization, the regularity of leader entry, and the competitiveness of legislative elections. These characteristics are robustly associated with higher investment. Our evidence also points to an effect on the risk of expropriation in nondemocracies.
Opinion polls suggest that Vladimir Putin has broad support in Russia, but there are concerns that some respondents may be lying to pollsters. Using list experiments, we revisit our earlier work on ...support for Putin to explore his popularity between late 2020 and mid-2022. Our findings paint an ambiguous portrait. A naive interpretation of our estimates implies that Putin was 10 to 20 percentage points less popular than opinion polls suggest. However, results from placebo experiments demonstrate that these estimates are likely subject to artificial deflation - a design effect that produces downward bias in estimates from list experiments. Although we cannot be definitive, on balance our results are consistent with the conclusion that Putin is roughly as popular as opinion polls suggest. Methodologically, our research highlights artificial deflation as a key limitation of list experiments and the importance of placebo lists as a tool to diagnose this problem.
We examine the impact of political turnover on economic performance in a setting of largely unanticipated political change and profoundly weak institutions: the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. ...Exploiting census-type panel data on over 7,000 manufacturing enterprises, we find that the productivity of firms in the regions most supportive of Viktor Yushchenko increased by more than 15 percentage points in the three years following his election, relative to that in the most anti-Yushchenko regions. We conclude that this effect is driven primarily by particularistic rather than general economic policies that disproportionately increased output among large enterprises, government suppliers, and private enterprises—three types of firms that had much to gain or lose from turnover at the national level. Our results demonstrate that political turnover in the context of weak institutions can have substantial distributional effects that are reflected in economic productivity.
Social scientists teach that politicians favor groups that are organized over those that are not. Representation Through Taxation challenges this conventional wisdom. Emphasizing that there are ...limits to what organized interests can credibly promise in return for favorable treatment, Gehlbach shows that politicians may instead give preference to groups – organized or not. Gehlbach develops this argument in the context of the postcommunist experience, focusing on the incentive of politicians to promote sectors that are naturally more tax compliant, regardless of their organization. In the former Soviet Union, tax systems were structured around familiar revenue sources, magnifying this incentive and helping to prejudice policy against new private enterprise. In Eastern Europe, in contrast, tax systems were created to cast the revenue net more widely, encouraging politicians to provide the collective goods necessary for new firms to flourish.
Businessman Candidates Gehlbach, Scott; Sonin, Konstantin; Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina
American journal of political science,
July 2010, Letnik:
54, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Why and when do businessmen run for public office rather than rely upon other means of influence? What are the implications of their participation for public policy? We show formally that ..."businessman candidacy" and public policy are jointly determined by the institutional environment. When institutions that hold elected officials accountable to voters are strong, businessmen receive little preferential treatment and are disinclined to run for office. When such institutions are weak, businessmen can subvert policy irrespective of whether they hold office, but they may run for office to avoid the cost of lobbying elected officials. Evidence from Russian gubernatorial elections supports the model's predictions. Businessman candidates emerge in regions with low media freedom and government transparency, institutions that raise the cost of reneging on campaign promises. Among regions with weaker institutions, professional politicians crowd out businessmen when the rents from office are especially large.
I re-examine Hirschman's classic text Exit, Voice, and Loyalty through a
game-theoretic interpretation of the relationship between exit and voice. The model,
which is general and applicable to ...diverse environments, treats exit as a costly
decision, which may be prevented through an appropriate choice of policy by the
leadership of an organization. Voice – the capacity of an
organization's members to participate in the setting of policy –
is similarly costly, but provides a share of the surplus from avoiding exit. The
formalization sheds light on the static and dynamic effects of exit, the conditions
for the development of voice, the impact of loyalty, and the decision of
organizational leaders to suppress voice and exit. I illustrate the model by
revisiting Hirschman's analysis of exit and voice in the collapse of East
German communism.
Government control of the media Gehlbach, Scott; Sonin, Konstantin
Journal of public economics,
10/2014, Letnik:
118
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time. Media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more ...likely when the government has a particular interest in mobilizing citizens to take actions that further some political objective but are not necessarily in citizens' individual best interest; however, the distinction between state and private media is smaller. Large advertising markets reduce media bias in both state and private media but increase the incentive for the government to nationalize private media. Media bias in state and private media markets diverge as governments become more democratic, whereas media bias in democracies and autocracies converge as positive externalities from mobilization increase.
•We provide a formal model of government control of the media.•Media bias and ownership are affected by nature of government and size of ad market.•Mobilizing governments increase media bias and pursue state ownership of media.•Large advertising markets reduce media bias but encourage state ownership of media.•Media ownership has a stronger effect on media bias in democracies.
Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their ...hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.
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