TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bentzen,Jeanet
AU  - Hariri,Jacob Gerner
AU  - Robinson,James A.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - The Indigenous Roots of Representative Democracy
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2015///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - May 2015; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w21193
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w21193
ER  -