From Democracy to Despotism: Tocqueville on Slavery, Colonialism and “Other”

Colonialism, European Descendants and Democracy

This paper advances that the share of European descendants in the population is a major determinant of democracy in former colonial countries. We test this hypothesis using cross-section and panel regressions with 60 developing and developed countries that were once colonies. We …nd that the share of European descendants can explain more than half of the di¤erence in measures of democracy betwe...

Social Mobility and Stability of Democracy: Re-evaluating De Tocqueville∗

An influential thesis often associated with De Tocqueville views social mobility as a bulwark of democracy: when members of a social group expect to join the ranks of other social groups in the near future, they should have less reason to exclude these other groups from the political process. In this paper, we investigate this hypothesis using a dynamic model of political economy. As well as fo...

Did British Colonialism Promote Democracy? Divergent Inheritances and Diminishing Legacies*

Many scholars have argued that British colonial rule promoted post-independence democracy, but there has been considerable debate over the robustness of this result and its causes. We show that this relationship follows a strong temporal pattern. Although former British colonies were considerably more democratic than other countries immediately following independence, subsequent convergence in ...

Ideology and Imagery in the Law of Slavery - Symposium on the Law of Slavery: Theories of Democracy and the Law of Slavery

Democracy and Other Goods

* This paper was prepared for the conference on Rethinking Democracy for a New Century, held at Yale University, 28 February-2 March, 1997. It has benefited from the comments of Brian Barry, Joshua Cohen, John Ferejohn, Paul Seabright, and Ian Shapiro. Research support from the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm, is gratefully acknowledged. The paper is forthcomin...