Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands

Abstract

Emancipation of slaves in the 1830s transformed the political elites of the British-Caribbean plantation islands. New elites were more accountable to the citizenry. We develop a theory in which two factors limit and possibly reverse the effect of this on political outcomes, with legislators (i) 'stepping up to pass extractive policies and/or (ii) weakening democratic institutions. The theory is supported by an historical analysis of ten Caribbean plantation islands, based on original archival data on legislator race, occupation and roll-call voting. Eventually, all assemblies that experienced a significant change in composition dissolved themselves and converted to British 'Crown Rule'.

Elite Identity and Political Accountability: A Tale of Ten Islands

“…The threat of violent uprisings loomed ever-large over Caribbean elites and it was the new elite who was most exposed to it, as it could not count on the protection of the British Naval garrison and the colonial judicial apparatus to the same degree as British citizens (Trouillot, 1988, p. 101). 29 An earlier version of this paper studied these non-electoral sources of political accountability, and found similar results to the ones presented here (Carvalho and Dippel, 2016), but had to rely on scarce and potentially inconsistently reported episodes of local riots. We therefore re-focused the analysis on electoral accountability.…”

“…Occupational choice and race may be correlated. For example, most large farmers in Zimbabwe were of British origin under Mugabe until the land reforms in 2000.11 We examined the threat of revolt as a source of political accountability in an earlier version of the paper(Carvalho and Dippel, 2016).12 This is a departure from citizen-candidate models in which a single decision maker is selected from the citizenry(Osborne and Slivinski, 1996;Besley and Coate, 1997). Models of legislative bargaining have more than one political decision maker(Buchanan and Tullock, 1962;Weingast, 1979), but their focus is on dividing a fixed budget among districts(Baron and Ferejohn, 1989), whereas we examine voting over a common, extractive policy.13 This matches the Caribbean context, but does not qualitatively change any of the results.…”

Ballots Instead of Bullets? The Effect of the Voting Rights Act on Political Violence

“…Elites may also non-violently block reforms and political changes after the extension of voting rights (Carvalho and Dippel, 2020). This mechanism may explain why the effect of enfranchisement on political outcomes does not always materialize (Berlinski and Dewan, 2011;De Bromhead et al, 2020).…”