CONTEMPORARY QUASI-DEMOCRACIES

Determinants of Trade Protection in Contemporary Democracies: Whose interests do elected officials serve through trade protection?

Earlier economic studies attribute the presence of trade barriers to the fact that protectionist interest groups better articulate their policy demands due to their greater abilities to overcome collective action problems. Contrary to consumer groups, protectionist interests have strong incentive to influence politicians through lobbying and campaign activities since the benefits of protection ...

Devolution in (Non-)Democracies

The paper develops a very simple model explaining the process of devolution of an individual region in a politically asymmetric country, where a region and the central government bargain over the distribution of tax revenue given a particular tax rate, focusing on the impact of political regime on the decentralization outcome. It finds that under most political settings large regions, regions w...

Do Democracies Attract Portfolio Investment?

Corruption and power in democracies

According to Acton: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. We study the implications of Acton’s dictum in models where citizens vote (for three parties) and governments then form in a series of elections. In each election, parties have Þxed tastes for graft, which affect negotiations to form a government if parliament hangs; but incumbency changes tastes across elections. We a...

Crime in New Democracies ∗

Crime rates have surged in nearly all new democracies. To explain this empirical regularity, we model the effects of political regimes on law enforcement and parametrize political regimes by their vulnerability to violent overthrow. It is assumed that democracies are less vulnerable than dictatorships. We first show that dictatorships generate more investment in “political protection” or secret...