Bentzen, Jeanet. <br/><br/>
The Indigenous Roots of Representative Democracy / 
Jeanet Bentzen, Jacob Gerner Hariri, James A. Robinson. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  2015. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w21193 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w21193. .
<br/><br/> May 2015. 
<br/><br/> 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. 
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