An institutional remedy for ethnic patronage politics

Durant, Thomas Clark; Weintraub, Michael

doi:10.1177/0951629813488986

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In a set of prior papers (Durant & Weintraub, 2014a,b), we use game-theoretic models to discuss how turn-taking institutions with two leaders create a symmetry between those ‘in’ and those ‘out’ of office that has attractive properties when it comes to forming, enforcing, and adapting the terms of cooperation, not unlike the veil constructs proposed by Buchanan & Tullock (1962) and Rawls (1999). Specifically, the variation we considered yields a single winner when sufficient consensus exists (e.g.…”

Section: Alternative Approaches To Executive Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trust in the executive

Durant

Weintraub²,

Houser

et al. 2018

Journal of Peace Research

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Why is it so hard to get opposing elites to work together rather than to seek partisan gains and/or political survival? While the credible commitment problem is widely known, there are a number of lesser known obstacles to building trust and trustworthiness between opposing elites. This article presents an account of how some of those obstacles interact through time. Common institutional types, particularly winner-takes-all and power-sharing institutions, force trade-offs between agile responses in the short term and medium-term trust between elites, on the one hand, and between trust among elites in the medium term and the adaptability of agreements in the long term, on the other. We call this the ‘time horizon trilemma’. As an alternative approach, we consider a variant on the two-person consulate used by the Roman Republic for more than 400 years as Rome rose to prominence. In our variant, a ‘turn-taking institution’, opposing executives take short alternating turns as the ultimate decisionmaker within one term. We conduct behavioral games in the experimental lab to provide an initial estimate of the impact of these institutional types – winner-takes-all, requiring consensus only, requiring turn-taking only, or requiring both – on overcoming obstacles to agile responses in the short term, trust among elites in the medium term, and adaptability of agreements in the long term. We find that turn-taking is a promising alternative to solving the time horizon trilemma.

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Section: Alternative Approaches To Executive Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trust in the executive

Durant

Weintraub²,

Houser

et al. 2018

Journal of Peace Research

Self Cite

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“… 18. We discuss this dynamic in depth elsewhere (Durant and Weintraub, 2014). …”

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How to make democracy self-enforcing after civil war: Enabling credible yet adaptable elite pacts

Durant

Weintraub

2014

Conflict Management and Peace Science

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While many recommend electoral democracy as a way to avoid or resolve civil conflict, the empirical record of electoral democracy as an alternative to civil conflict is decidedly mixed. We apply recent work from new organizational economics on the nature of elite pacts to add to both sides of the debate. On the one hand, we argue that we should be more pessimistic about the ability of existing electoral institutions to help rather than hurt the prospects for a stable peace. We argue that the new organizational economics reveals a design dilemma—a forced trade-off between the credible commitment to an elite pact in the short term and the adaptability of an elite pact in the long term—that plagues the most commonly considered alternatives. On the other hand, we tentatively argue for optimism if institutional designers work with criteria that explicitly take the dilemma into account. We propose novel design criteria that would allow a polity to address the design dilemma.

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The zecca mint: a self-enforcing monetary constitution in historic venice

Al-Bawwab

2021

Econ Gov

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An institutional remedy for ethnic patronage politics

Cited by 9 publications

References 42 publications

Trust in the executive

Trust in the executive

How to make democracy self-enforcing after civil war: Enabling credible yet adaptable elite pacts

The zecca mint: a self-enforcing monetary constitution in historic venice

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