Papers by Jonathan K Hanson
A common argument in the political economy literature is that rulers who are accountable to large... more A common argument in the political economy literature is that rulers who are accountable to larger coalitions will allocate spending toward public goods rather than particularistic, private goods that benefit the few. Price subsidies for energy and public utilities do not fit this claim comfortably. These subsidies, while delivered broadly, are costly and distortionary, crowding out other forms of public spending. Yet, attempts to reduce them are often met with vigorous political protests. New data on the extent to which countries subsidize coal, oil, natural gas and electricity allow a fresh look at long-standing questions in political economy research about policy outputs. First, do democracies provide subsidies at higher rates than non-democracies? Second, do other institutional forms that create accountability to broader segments of society provide greater subsidies?
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This paper seeks to synthesize theories from the comparative politics and international relations... more This paper seeks to synthesize theories from the comparative politics and international relations literature about what leads to state building and the growth of state capacity. It draws upon these theories to develop a range of empirical propositions and test them using the State Capacity Dataset (Hanson and Sigman 2013). The objective is for these findings to help determine the relative importance of different explanatory factors and facilitate the process of bringing them together into a holistic framework.
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In what types of institutional environments are international development projects most likely to... more In what types of institutional environments are international development projects most likely to succeed? Previous research suggests alternatively that liberal economic policies, democratic political institutions, and institutions characterized by " good governance " are all of primary importance. A serious drawback of this work is that measures of institutional quality tend to have poor coverage and conceptual fuzziness. This paper uses a new measure of state capacity with continuous coverage from 1960-2010 to evaluate the importance of different types of institutions on the success of over 9000 World Bank projects. The results suggest that development projects are most likely to succeed where state capacity is relatively high, regardless of regime type or Freedom House scores. Successful World Bank projects can, in turn, have a positive impact on State Capacity suggesting the possibility of a virtuous circle of development projects and state capacity building. Prepared for presentation at the 2016 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association , Chicago, Illinois.
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Journal of Politics, forthcoming, 2020
State capacity is a core concept in political science research, and it is widely recognized that ... more State capacity is a core concept in political science research, and it is widely recognized that state institutions exert considerable influence on outcomes such as economic development, civil conflict, democratic consolidation, and international security. Yet, researchers across these fields of inquiry face common problems involved in conceptualizing and measuring state capacity. This article examines these conceptual issues, identifies three common dimensions of state capacity, and uses Bayesian latent variable analysis to assess the extent to which these dimensions are discernible in available indicators of state capacity. We use the resulting State Capacity Dataset to provide new insight into existing theories of the influence of state capacity on development and the success of World Bank projects. It is hoped that this project will provide effective guidance and tools to researchers studying the causes and consequences of state capacity.
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This paper discusses three main challenges to gaining a better understanding of whether state cap... more This paper discusses three main challenges to gaining a better understanding of whether state capacity facilitates the survival of electoral authoritarian regimes. First, the concept of state capacity is multi-dimensional and overlaps with other relevant concepts. Second, there is a range of different strategies that authoritarian rulers can employ to foster their survival, and these strategies draw upon different dimensions of state capacity. Third, good indicators of the different dimensions of state capacity for empirical work are sorely lacking. To address these challenges, this paper outlines three core dimensions of state capacity -- extractive, coercive, and administrative capacity -- and explores their connection to how authoritarian regimes address threats to their control from society and from within the ruling elite. It then assesses different approaches to measuring the three dimensions of state capacity.
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Traditional economic growth regressions are not adequate to identify the role of political instit... more Traditional economic growth regressions are not adequate to identify the role of political institutions because they assume a universal growth paradigm exists. Instead, there are distinct paradigms of investment- and innovation-based growth, and the effects of political institutions vary across them. Using a dataset covering 83 countries from 1965-2008, this study employs a mixture models estimation to identify these paradigms. It finds that state authority is critical for countries engaged in investment-based growth, and competitive political participation tempers the pace of capital accumulation but increases productivity growth. Conversely, where innovation-based growth predominates, state authority has little effect and competitive political participation slows the pace of growth. Constraints on rulers do not support investment in either paradigm.
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Empirical research in the New Institutional Economics tradition has concentrated on the degree to... more Empirical research in the New Institutional Economics tradition has concentrated on the degree to which institutional constraints on rulers protect property rights and foster growth through private investment. This view of institutions is overly narrow, neglecting the role of state capacity in particular. Both state authority and constraints on rulers matter for economic performance, but the relative strength of these effects depend upon a country's ``distance'' from the frontier of the world economy. Tests using a panel dataset that covers up to 84 countries from the period 1960-2005 reveal that, in countries that have low GDP per capita, constraints on rulers in the form of checks and balances affect neither the rate of productivity growth nor the growth of capital stock per worker. Basic state authority, however, has a strong, positive effect on both of these outcomes. The story is different for advanced industrial economies, where the effects of checks are positive, especially with respect to productivity growth. Institutional checks on rulers are thus not an agent of investment-based growth but support continued growth based upon innovation at the leading edge.
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When it comes to social welfare, we do not have clear understanding of whether it is more importa... more When it comes to social welfare, we do not have clear understanding of whether it is more important to have democracy or a capable state. Specifically, most studies do not consider the possibility that effects of democracy are conditioned or obscured by differences in the capabilities of states to deliver services effectively. This article contends that better developmental outcomes can result from either democracy or state capacity, but the combination of high levels of both democracy and state capacity is not synergistic. Empirical evidence from a time-series-cross-sectional dataset covering up to 153 countries during the 1965-2010 time period supports the conclusion that these factors partially substitute for each other with respect to improving outcomes in school enrollment and infant mortality. These findings provide a more optimistic answer to the query of Ross (2006) as to whether democracy is good for the poor. Once accounting for state capacity, we find that democracy leads to better development outcomes.
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This paper uses data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to explore the interrelationsh... more This paper uses data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to explore the interrelationships of ethnic diversity, political institutions, and development outcomes, such as education and public health indicators. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that the effects of ethnic diversity on these outcomes are mediated by the degree of political competition and the geographic distribution of ethnic populations. The DHS data have been collected in dozens of countries using nationally representative samples. These data, however, do not include measures of political institutions. This paper is part of a broader project that will expand the datasets to include political indicators, facilitating both cross-national and sub-national analyses. The ability to use individual-level survey data, rather than national indicators of development, permits the measurement of inequality in outcomes across ethnic groups and trace these outcomes to political patterns in each country.
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This article seeks to explain inequality outcomes in authoritarian regimes as a function of the d... more This article seeks to explain inequality outcomes in authoritarian regimes as a function of the different combinations of loyalty-building and repressive measures (carrots and sticks) that authoritarian rulers use to maintain power. Like democratically-elected rulers, authoritarian rulers supply public and private goods in response to competitive pressures, and they can also employ repression to raise the costs of political dissent. The optimal combination of carrots and sticks varies across authoritarian regimes according to the nature of the political institutions by which authoritarian rule is organized. The results are economic policy outcomes that, over time, affect the level of economic inequality. Using a cross-national dataset covering over 80 authoritarian regimes observed during the 1965-2005 time period, this article develops and tests hypotheses that link inequality outcomes to authoritarian regime types.
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This article investigates the manner in which the characteristics of selection institutions inter... more This article investigates the manner in which the characteristics of selection institutions interact with country social context to affect development outcomes. Previous work has established that higher levels of social heterogeneity are associated with lower levels of public goods provision (Easterly and Levine, 1997; Alesina et al., 1999). Democracy tends to ameliorate these negative effects (Collier, 2000). Since democracy is a multidimensional concept, however, identifying which characteristics of democracy produce better development outcomes in diverse social contexts is important. Building upon models of probabilistic voting, this paper considers two such dimensions: contestation and inclusiveness (Dahl, 1971; Coppedge et al., 2008). Empirical tests using a time-series-cross-sectional dataset covering 146 countries indicate that political contestation matters more than inclusiveness for reducing rates of infant mortality in countries with high levels of social heterogeneity. Conversely, where levels of social heterogeneity are low, greater inclusiveness appears to reduce infant mortality.
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Papers by Jonathan K Hanson