Kidnapping democracy: oligarchy, mediacracy and globalization

Oligarchy, democracy, inequality and growth

This paper analyses the dynamics of inequality, democratization and economic development in a political economy model of growth where education is both the engine of growth and a determinant of political participation. In a context with imperfect capital markets, we investigate the incentives for an educated oligarchy to subsidize the poor’s education and to initiate a democratic transition. We...

Globalization and Democracy

By 1996, 66% of the countries of the world were using elections to choose their top leaders. This wave of democratization was accompanied by a paradigm shift that took the large number of historically clustered democratizations and called it a “wave.” The scholarship has moved beyond overly episodic, event-oriented accounts of democratization to comparative work that investigates the impact of ...

Investment and Expropriation under Oligarchy and Democracy in a Heckscher-Ohlin World

We study the incentives to expropriate foreign capital under democracy and oligarchy. We model a two-sector small open economy where foreign investment triggers Stolper-Samuelson effects through reducing exporting costs. We show how incentives to expropriate depend on the distributional effects of the investment and on how these affect the interests of the group in power. How investment affects...

Globalization, Democracy, and Social Spending in Latin America, 1980-1997

City-Regions, Neoliberal Globalization and Democracy: A Research Agenda

This paper argues that research on city-regions could benefit from more sustained and critical attention to the question of democracy. That is, it should examine more closely how decisions in city-regions are made, why they are made that way, and how they can be made more democratically. Much current research on politics in cities has framed the issue in terms of citizenship. That work has prod...