In this paper we argue that religion and welfare state spending are substitute mechanisms that insure individuals against adverse life events. As a result, individuals who are religious are predicted to prefer lower levels of social insurance than will individuals who are secular. To the extent policy outcomes reflect individual preferences, then countries with higher levels of religiosity should have lower levels of welfare state spending. In formalizing our argument we also suggest that if benefits from religion are subject to a network externality (I derive greater pleasure from religion when others are also religious), it is possible for countries that are similar in terms of underlying conditions to exhibit multiple equilibria with respect to religion and social insurance. We empirically test our predictions using individual-level data on religiosity, individual-level data on social insurance preferences, and crosscountry data on social spending outcomes. The findings are strongly supportive of our hypotheses.

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, seminar participants at CSAE, Oxford and at the LSE, as well as three anonymous referees and the editors for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Department for International Development (UK) for funding this research.While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where "weak institutions" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this paper I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education.I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education, and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization. 1 1. IntroductionAt the time of the African democracy movements of the early 1990s opinions varied widely about the effect of democratization on economic performance and on economic policy. While some authors predicted that democracy would be associated with major economic changes, other observers were less optimistic, suggesting that the formal trappings of multiparty democracy would have only a limited impact. With several years of hindsight, we can begin to ask whether and how policies adopted by elected African governments have actually differed from those pursued by authoritarian regimes. African countries represent an important set of cases for scholars interested in investigating whether democratic transitions can have an impact on policy even in "weaklyinstitutionalized polities" where democratic rules may be imperfectly respected, and where policy choices may depend primarily upon patron-client relationships. In this paper I ask whether the move to multiparty electoral competition that took place in many African countries during the 1990s has prompted governments to spend more on primary education. This paper contributes to a small but growing literature that examines whether democracies behave differently from their authoritarian counterparts when it comes to the provision of public services. Work by Brown and Hunter (1999), Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo (2001), and Ames (1987) has found that democracies in Latin America tend to spend more on items like education and health than do autocracies. Brown and Hunter (2004) have found that Latin Am...

In recent years there have been numerous calls for making the operations of international organizations more "transparent+" One element in these demands involves the idea that international negotiations should be open to the same level of outside scrutiny that is presumed to prevail with bargaining in domestic contexts+ While transparency of this sort may have clear benefits by facilitating attempts to hold officials accountable, scholars have made less effort to consider whether making international bargaining more public might also have detrimental effects+ I develop a game-theoretic model that provides four hypotheses about the relative benefits of open-door versus closed-door bargaining, and about the preferences of different actors with regard to this type of transparency+ This model, which can be applied to international and domestic contexts, helps extend positive theories about the design of institutions while also providing insights for the normative question of when transparency is desirable+ I show that the hypotheses developed are supported both by historical evidence from eighteenth-century disputes about publicity in national parliaments, and by evidence from the more recent dispute about making European Council of Ministers deliberations public+ I would like to thank

S cholars investigating European state development have long placed a heavy emphasis on the role played by representative institutions. The presence of an active representative assembly, it is argued, allowed citizens and rulers to contract over raising revenue and accessing credit. It may also have had implications for economic growth. These arguments have in turn been used to draw broad implications about the causal effect of analogous institutions in other places and during other time periods. But if assemblies had such clear efficiency benefits, why did they not become a universal phenomenon in Europe prior to the nineteenth century? I argue that in an era of costly communications and transport, an intensive form of political representative was much easier to sustain in geographically compact polities. This simple fact had important implications for the pattern of European state formation, and it may provide one reason why small states were able to survive despite threats from much larger neighbors. I test several relevant hypotheses using an original data set that provides the first broad view of European representative institutions in the medieval and early modern eras. I combine this with a geographic information system data set of state boundaries and populations in Europe between 1250 and 1750. The results suggest a strong effect of geographic scale on the format of political representation. The broader implication of this result is to provide a reminder that if institutions help solve contracting problems, ultimately, the maintenance of institutions may itself depend on ongoing transactions costs.

, seminar participants at CSAE, Oxford and at the LSE, as well as three anonymous referees and the editors for comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Department for International Development (UK) for funding this research.While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where "weak institutions" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this paper I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education.I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education, and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization. 1 1. IntroductionAt the time of the African democracy movements of the early 1990s opinions varied widely about the effect of democratization on economic performance and on economic policy. While some authors predicted that democracy would be associated with major economic changes, other observers were less optimistic, suggesting that the formal trappings of multiparty democracy would have only a limited impact. With several years of hindsight, we can begin to ask whether and how policies adopted by elected African governments have actually differed from those pursued by authoritarian regimes. African countries represent an important set of cases for scholars interested in investigating whether democratic transitions can have an impact on policy even in "weaklyinstitutionalized polities" where democratic rules may be imperfectly respected, and where policy choices may depend primarily upon patron-client relationships. In this paper I ask whether the move to multiparty electoral competition that took place in many African countries during the 1990s has prompted governments to spend more on primary education. This paper contributes to a small but growing literature that examines whether democracies behave differently from their authoritarian counterparts when it comes to the provision of public services. Work by Brown and Hunter (1999), Kaufman and Segura-Ubiergo (2001), and Ames (1987) has found that democracies in Latin America tend to spend more on items like education and health than do autocracies. Brown and Hunter (2004) have found that Latin Am...

The dominant narrative of the politics of redistribution in political science and economics highlights the signature role of the rise of electoral democracy and the development of political parties that mobilize working-class groups+ We argue in this article that this narrative ignores the critical role played by mass warfare in the development of redistributive public policies+ Focusing attention on the determinants of progressive taxation, we argue that mobilization for mass warfare led to demands for increased taxation of the wealthy to more fairly distribute the burden for the war effort+ We then show empirically that during the past century, mass mobilization for war has been associated with a notable increase in tax progressivity+ In the absence of war, neither the establishment of universal suffrage, nor the arrival of political control by parties of the left is systematically associated with large increases in tax progressivity+ In making these arguments, we devote particular attention to a "difference-in-differences" comparison of participants and nonparticipants in World War I+ Those who have made fortunes out of the war must pay for the war; and Labour will insist upon heavily graduated direct taxation with a raising of the exemption limit+ That is what Labour means by the Conscription of Wealth+ -Labour Party Manifesto, 1918 1 We would like to thank

Lindert (2004) makes claims about democracy and basic service provision in a historical context, Sen (1999) has also long been associated with the idea that democratic governments might be more likely to fulfill certain needs of their population.