Political Institutions and Regimes since 1600: A New Historical Data Set

Rånge, Max; Sandberg, Mikael

doi:10.1162/jinh_a_01052

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…This imposes an important limitation on the sample size. There exist other measures of institutional quality for the nineteenth century such as the Polity V index (see also Rånge & Sandberg, 2017 ), but they speak to political institutions rather than economic institutions. Accordingly, we are constrained to a maximum sample size of the twenty countries in the HIEL dataset.…”

Section: Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics, economic freedom, and institutional trade-offs

Geloso

2021

Eur J Law Econ

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We argue that institutions are bundles that involve trade-offs in the government's ability to provide public goods that affect public health. We hypothesize that the institutions underlying economic freedom affect the mix of diseases by reducing diseases of poverty relative to diseases of commerce (those associated with free movement of people, such as smallpox or COVID-19). We focus on smallpox and typhoid fever in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century in order to build on recent work that make arguments similar to ours, especially the framework Werner Troesken sets forth in The Pox of Liberty. Our evidence shows that economic freedom, in multiple periods of time and settings prior to the eradication of smallpox in the second half of the twentieth century, reduced typhoid mortality but had no effect on smallpox deaths. The implication for COVID-19 is that the trade-off between fighting the pandemic and preserving economic freedom may not be too severe in the short run. However, in the long run, the wealth benefits from economic freedom are likely to be crucial in reducing vulnerability to diseases of commerce primarily from their impact on comorbidities (such as diabetes and heart disease). Thus, economic freedom is on balance good for public health, which suggests that it, while requiring trade-offs, might be the best institutional bundle for dealing with pandemics.

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Section: Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics, economic freedom, and institutional trade-offs

Geloso

2021

Eur J Law Econ

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“…The Polity IV rating, done on an annual basis and shown in Figure 3, obscures the reality of institutional changes occurring month to month. A more nuanced measure, the Max Range "regime value" (Rånge and Sandberg 2017), better shows the positive conditions that Hungary faced in 1945 (Figure 4). 9 In the first 9 The Max Range regime value contains within it four sub-variables, including regime type, accountability structure, executive strength, and whether a regime is "normal" or "interim."…”

Section: The Aftermath: the Path Unwindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Short Waves in Hungary, 1923 and 1946: Persistence, Chaos, and (Lack of) Control

Hartwell

2018

SSRN Journal

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Monetary policies follow a complex and chaotic process, one that is enhanced when monetary growth is taken to the extreme, as in hyperinflation. While we have a basic understanding of the complex dynamics of hyperinflation, a less-explored phenomenon accompanying hyperinflationary episodes is the effect that they have on institutional development. Building on recent advances in economic history examining monetary policy and institutions, this analysis uses more explicit recourse to complexity theory and in particular complex adaptive systems to examine two separate hyperinflationary episodes in Hungary, 1923 and1946. Delving into the institutional and cultural roots of the inflationary policies of the Hungarian government and detailing the institutional effects which succeeded hyperinflation, this paper shows that the twin experiences of Hungary were both chaotic and created a chaotic and complex aftermath, the results of which are still being felt. Indeed, Hungary's 1923 and especially its 1946 hyperinflation shows that some economic chaos cannot be restrained by political institutions and in fact the institutions themselves were changed. When staring into the abyss, Hungary also found that the abyss stared back.

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“…9 The reality of institutional change is that it is slow-moving even over a period as long as 126 years, and to treat it as a continuous rather than lumpy process would result in biased or inaccurate results. Using the MaxRange indicator of political regimes, 10 this paper corrects for this persistent oversight in applying count data methods to understand how repeated political instability can affect infrequent formal political shifts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shooting for the Tsars: Heterogeneous Political Volatility and Institutional Change in Russia

Hartwell

2020

Terrorism and Political Violence

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Can deliberate political instability, including terrorism and/or political violence, have an effect on changing formal political institutions? This paper offers two major contributions toward answering this question, one focused on data and one focused on methodology. In the first instance, this paper introduces a brand-new dataset of monthly political instability in Russia from 1788 to 1914; Czarist Russia was a country plagued by informal instability and political violence throughout the nineteenth century, and which saw waves of reform and reaction. As such, it makes an excellent test case for examining the relationship between informal political instability and formal political change. Secondly, in order to trace the evolution of Russia's political institutions in the presence of various forms of instability, I utilize non-traditional estimation in the form of Poisson, IV-Poisson-GMM, and logistic regressions to account for the slow-moving nature of political regime change. The results of these estimations show that some forms of instability did indeed "work" in forcing a modicum of liberalization. On the other hand, large-scale unrest or external conflict had no correlation with political regime change and actually appeared to be counterproductive.

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Political Institutions and Regimes since 1600: A New Historical Data Set

Cited by 7 publications

References 8 publications

Pandemics, economic freedom, and institutional trade-offs

Pandemics, economic freedom, and institutional trade-offs

Short Waves in Hungary, 1923 and 1946: Persistence, Chaos, and (Lack of) Control

Shooting for the Tsars: Heterogeneous Political Volatility and Institutional Change in Russia

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