The Indigenous Roots of Representative Democracy / Jeanet Bentzen, Jacob Gerner Hariri, James A. Robinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bentzen, Jeanet.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hariri, Jacob Gerner.

Robinson, James A.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21193.

NBER working paper series no. w21193

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

We document that rules for leadership succession in ethnic societies that antedate the modern state predict contemporary political regimes; leadership selection by election in indigenous societies is associated with contemporary representative democracy. The basic association, however, is conditioned on the relative strength of the indigenous groups within a country; stronger groups seem to have been able to shape national regime trajectories, weaker groups do not. This finding extends and qualifies a substantive qualitative literature, which has found in local democratic institutions of medieval Europe a positive impulse towards the development of representative democracy. It shows that contemporary regimes are shaped not only by colonial history and European influence; indigenous history also matters. For practitioners, our findings suggest that external reformers' capacity for regime-building should not be exaggerated.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2015.