Institutional transformation and the origins of world income distribution

Political instability, institutional change and economic growth in Brazil since 1870

“…In this sub-section, we will focus on comparisons with other common measures of institutional development. Although our definitions and coding differ from measurements of democracy and institutional development introduced in the previous literature, due to the fact that they are more granular, we can find some substantial correlations between our indicators and those introduced by Acemoglu et al (2002), Boix et al (2013), Lindberg et al (2014) and Spruk (2016aSpruk ( , 2016b. Acemoglu et al (2002) quantify institutions using among others the constraints on the executive (a variable described in Gurr (1996), and later updated in Marshall et al (2015)) from Polity III data set, which serves as a proxy for the level of concentration of political power in the hands of ruling groups.…”

“…To address this issue, we control for the effect of human capital formation using the average years of education (data obtained from Spruk (2016b)) and see whether controlling for human capital renders the effects of our key institutional explanatory variables weak, stronger or unchanged. Furthermore, to eliminate any direct confluence of political institutions induced by adverse physical geography (Miguel et al , 2004) we consider the variation in rainfall (rain) as well as in annual temperature (temp), which serve as observable measures of climatic shock (data obtained from the World Bank).…”

“…Finally, Spruk (2016a, 2016b) measured institutional changes and investigated the impact of ‘ de jure ’ and ‘ de facto ’ political institutions on the long-run economic growth for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000 (due to space limitations see Figure A3.e for a sample of those components). Compared with their data set we estimate high correlation between their de jure (and in particular competitiveness and openness of executive recruitment) and de facto components (civil liberties and political rights) and our informal (namely assassinations, demonstrations and guerrilla warfare) and formal (such as legislative effectiveness and legislative selection) institution indicators.…”

“…Asteriou and Price (2001) examine the influence of political instability on UK economic growth and find that political instability affects growth negatively whereas it has a positive impact on its uncertainty. Spruk (2016a) examined the impact of de jure and de facto political institutions on the long-run economic growth for a large panel of countries. The empirical evidence suggests that societies with more extractive political institutions in Latin America experienced slower long-run economic growth and failed to converge with the West.…”

Electoral systems and income inequality: a tale of political equality

“…The demand for data on political equality dates back to Verba and Orren (1985), and the present paper benefits from the availability nowadays of quantitative methods and data coverage (Bartels 2017;Pemstein et al 2015;Houle 2018). Disentangling the effects of de jure and de facto conceptualisations of democratic politics might ultimately provide a better insight into the link between democracy and inequality, as extant literature has done regarding the link between political institutions and economic growth (Spruk 2016;Hartmann and Spruk 2020).…”