Like it or not, history shows that taxes and bureaucracy are cornerstones of democracy (Richard E. Blanton, Lane F. Fargher, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski) EurekAlert! Science News (original) (raw)
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American Political Science Review, 2020
The idea that rulers must seek consent before making policy is key to democracy. We suggest that this practice evolved independently in a large fraction of human societies where executives ruled jointly with councils. We argue that council governance was more likely to emerge when information asymmetries made it harder for rulers to extract revenue, and we illustrate this with a theoretical model. Giving the population a role in governance became one means of overcoming the information problem. We test this hypothesis by examining the correlation between localized variation in agricultural suitability and the presence of council governance in the Standard Cross Cultural Sample. As a further step, we suggest that executives facing substantial information asymmetries could also have an alternative route for resource extraction—develop a bureaucracy to measure variation in productivity. Further empirical results suggest that rule by bureaucracy could substitute for shared rule with a c...
Revenue, Voice, and Public Goods in Three Pre-Modern States
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2007
At least since the European Enlightenment, Western theories of state formation have developed around a dichotomizing principle that distinguishes between a highly centralized non-Western "other," the oriental despotic, versus a more liberal, democratic and market-driven Western form of the state (e.g., Sherratt 1989: 164 ). More recently, another non-Western type, the loosely integrated segmentary state, has been identified in the anthropological literature (e.g., Asad 1973), including many pre-modem states of sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Hindu South Asia (Southall 1956: 248-49; 1988: 64-65; Stein 1980 : 265-74, 339; 1995). Neoevolutionists and other anthropologists interested in the development of early states focused most of their attention on non-Western forms (e.g., Harris 1979: 102; Service 1975). From this perspective they constructed their causal models on the premise that state-building reflects primarily the emergence of a strategizing governing elite able to, variously, organize networks of redistri bution (Service 1975), maintain an order of stratification (Fried 1967: 235), provide irrigation services (Wittfogel 1957), reorganize managerial systems in response to socio-environmental stress (Flannery 1972), dominate com moners under conditions of resource stress (Carneiro 1970; Sanders et al. 1976) , or stage rituals confirming the centrality of rulers in a hierarchical cosmos (e.g., Geertz 1980). The concept of a more democratic and market-driven Western state for mation process incorporates a relatively greater role for commoner voices and strategic action in state building (e.g., Midlarsky 1999: 188- 93), a causal element largely absent in theories of the non-Western state. In this paper, we present a collective action approach that provides a processual alterna tive to theories positing inherent differences between the West and the rest with regards to the comparative significance of commoner versus elite strategic behavior, and we provisionally evaluate the theory by comparing the nature of collective action in one non-Western (Aztec) and two Western states (England under Edward III and Renaissance Venice). Collective action theory provides a valuable analytical direction for explaining alternate pathways to state formation given that it specifies the conditions favoring the development of more centralized and despotic regimes versus the development of more egalitarian polities that allow for a greater degree of commoner strategizing and voice. According to the theory, the political institutions and cultural features of a state reflect the outcomes of the rational choices of both commoners ("taxpayers" below) and those who govern ("rulers" below), and the mutual bargains made between them. Yet, the nature of strategies on both sides of the social divide is variable depending on the nature of state revenues and other factors we describe.
Income and Democracy: Comment †
American Economic Review, 2014
Acemoglu et al. (2008) document that the correlation between income per capita and democracy disappears when including time and country fixed effects. While their results are robust for the full sample, we find evidence for significant but heterogeneous effects of income on democracy: negative for former colonies, but positive for non-colonies. Within the sample of colonies we detect heterogeneous effects related to colonial history and early institutions. The zero mean effect estimated by Acemoglu et al. (2008) is consistent with effects of opposite signs in the different subsamples. Our findings are robust to the use of alternative data and estimation techniques. (JEL D72, O17, O47)