Democracy and Redistribution

Abstract

When do countries democratize? What facilitates the survival of authoritarian regimes? What determines the occurrence of revolutions, often leading to left-wing dictatorships, such as the Soviet regime? Although a large literature has developed since Aristotle through contemporary political science to answer these questions, we still lack a convincing understanding of the process of political development. Employing analytical tools borrowed from game theory, Carles Boix offers a complete theory of political transitions, in which political regimes ultimately hinge on the nature of economic assets, their distribution among individuals, and the balance of power among different social groups. Backed up by detailed historical work and extensive statistical analysis that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, this 2003 book explains why democracy emerged in classical Athens. It also discusses the early triumph of democracy in both nineteenth-century agrarian Norway, Switzerland and northeastern America and the failure in countries with a powerful landowning class.

War, Wealth and the Formation of States

“…Or, to put it differently, the level of aggressiveness of states will decline with asset mobility. Historically, asset mobility is correlated with the abundance of capital (and the relative scarcity of land) (Boix 2003). For that reason capital availability should lead to smaller states -just the opposite result of what we found by assuming that capital is more productive than land.…”

When the State Mirrors the Family: The Design of Pension Systems

“…This clearly implies total independency of children from their parents, and viceversa. The choice of taking 7 In Todd (1990) and then in Duranton (2009), a finer geographical mapping with a classification at regional level is provided. We will recur to this more detailed mapping at the end of session 5 when using individual European Value Survey (EVS) data.…”

A Psicologia Política das Classes Sociais no Brasil: Atributos das Atitudes Políticas por Estratificação e Mobilidade Social

“…Podemos pensar em, ao menos, quatro correntes de pesquisa: abordagens histórico-institucionais sobre as bases sociais e econômicas dos regimes políticos (Moore, 1983;Acemoglu e Robinson, 2006;Boix, 2003); a teoria da modernização e suas implicações para o comportamento político (Lipset, 1959); estudos mais recentes que empiricamente avaliam o efeito (ou ausência deste) da estratificação social em diversos indicadores de comportamento político (Krieckhaus et al, 2014); e o debate contemporâneo sobre a nova classe média no Brasil e na América Latina (Neri, 2010;Souza e Lamounier, 2010;Souza, 2012;Braga, 2012;Singer, 2012;Ferreira et al, 2013). Com base nessas teorias, delinearemos hipóteses sobre como membros das diferentes classes sociais pensam sobre a política, traduzindo-as em conceitos da psicologia política.…”