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The Economics of Transitions Democracy 1.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert H. Bates
Robert H. Bates*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

This paper explores the relationship between economics and politics in the creation of democracy. The first section examines the shaping influence of the revenue imperative; the second, of end-game bargaining between retreating despots and insurgent democrats; and the third, of human capital. The paper is informal in argument and playful in spirit. It is designed to stimulate and provoke rather than to educate and inform.

I do, however, seek to maintain a consistent set-up for the analysis: On one side stands a sovereign—in an earlier period, most likely a monarch; in the present typically a political party. The sovereign maintains a monopoly over the formulation of public policy and possesses the power to extract resources from the economy. On the other side stand the citizens. They own the factors of production: land, labor, and capital. They care about public policy, but they cannot make it. However, the decisions they do make influence the level of economic resources that can effectively be mobilized by the sovereign.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1991 , pp. 24 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1991

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Footnotes

1.

This paper was prepared for the Joint Meeting of Political Scientists from the United States and Hungary sponsored by the American Political Science Association and the International Research and Exchange Board, San Francisco, August 27–28, 1990. I wrote this essay while a Resident Scholar at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center. I wish to thank the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Science Foundation (Grant SES 8821151) for their support. I also wish to acknowledge the value of discussions with Alex Lerner and Adam Przeworski. The views expressed in this essay are my responsibility alone.

References

Notes

2. In debates over this subject, the definition of private property constitutes one of the major sources of controversy. The paragraph contains the definition employed in this essay: Private property rights exist in an economy when choices concerning capital and labor fall in the control set of the citizens but not in that of the state.

3. This section can be seen as an extension of ideas developed by Charles Lindblom, as well as an attempt to provide a causal grounding for some of the core ideas of the early modernization theorists. See Lindblom, Charles, “The Market as Prison,” The Journal of Markets and Politics 44, no. 2 (May 1982): 324–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977). See also Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy,” American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959): 69–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the concluding chapter of Almond, Gabriel A. and Coleman, James S., The Politics of the Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

4. Relevant citations would include: Prestwich, Michael, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1972)Google Scholar; Edwards, J. G., “The Personnel of the Commons in Parliament under Edward I and Edward II,” in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. Little, Andrew G. and Powieke, Frederick M. (Manchester: Book for Libraries Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Pollard, Adam F., The Evolution of Parliament (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1926)Google Scholar; McKisack, May, The Parliamentary Representation of the English Boroughs During the Middle Ages (London: Frank Cass, 1932)Google Scholar; Henneman, John Bell, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Development of War Financing 1322–1356 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Willard, James Field, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property 1290–1334: A Study in Medieval English Feudal Administration (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1934)Google Scholar; and Mitchell, Sydney Knox, Taxation in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951).Google Scholar See also the important new work: Levi, Margaret, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar Also, Bates, Robert H. and Lien, Da-Hsiang Donald, “A Note on Taxation, Development, and Representative Government,” Politics and Society 14, no. 1 (1985): 53–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Mitchell, , Taxation, p. 6.Google Scholar

6. Moore, Barrington, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966)Google Scholar; Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974).Google Scholar

7. See such discussions as in Zolberg, Aristide, “Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States: France and England,” International Social Science Journal 32, no. 4 (1980).Google Scholar

8. Quoted in Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. For formal argumentation, see Bates and Lien, “A Note on Taxation.”

10. Dahl, Robert, Who Governs? (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961).Google Scholar

11. Mitchell, , Taxation, p. 6.Google Scholar