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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Endogenous Political Legitimacy: The Tudor Roots Of England’S Constitutional Governance, Avner Greif, Jared Rubin
Endogenous Political Legitimacy: The Tudor Roots Of England’S Constitutional Governance, Avner Greif, Jared Rubin
ESI Working Papers
This paper highlights the importance of endogenous changes in the foundations of legitimacy for political regimes. It focuses on the central role of legitimacy changes in the rise of constitutional monarchy in England. It first defines legitimacy and briefly elaborates a theoretical framework enabling a historical study of this unobservable variable. It proceeds to substantiate that the low-legitimacy, post-Reformation Tudor monarchs of the 16th century promoted Parliament to enhance their legitimacy, thereby changing the legislative process from the “Crown and Parliament” to the “Crown in Parliament” that still prevails in England.
Competing Social Influence In Contested Diffusion: Luther, Erasmus And The Spread Of The Protestant Reformation, Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff, Yuan Hsiao, Jared Rubin
Competing Social Influence In Contested Diffusion: Luther, Erasmus And The Spread Of The Protestant Reformation, Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff, Yuan Hsiao, Jared Rubin
ESI Working Papers
The spread of radical institutional change does not often result from one-sided pro-innovation influence; countervailing influence networks in support of the status quo can suppress adoption. We develop a model of multiple and competing network diffusion. To apply the contested-diffusion model to real data, we look at the contest between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus, the two most influential intellectuals of early 16th-century Central Europe. Whereas Luther championed a radical reform of the Western Church that broke with Rome, Erasmus opposed him, stressing the unity of the Church. In the early phase of the Reformation, these two figures utilized influence …
Religion In Economic History: A Survey, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann
Religion In Economic History: A Survey, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann
ESI Working Papers
This chapter surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and on the period up to WWII. Works on Judaism address Jewish occupational specialization, human capital, emancipation, and the causes and consequences of Jewish persecution. One set of papers on Christianity studies the role of the Catholic Church in European economic history since the medieval period. Taking advantage of newly digitized data and advanced econometric techniques, the voluminous literature on the Protestant Reformation studies its …
The Paradox Of Power: Principal-Agent Problems And Fiscal Capacity In Absolutist Regimes, Debin Ma, Jared Rubin
The Paradox Of Power: Principal-Agent Problems And Fiscal Capacity In Absolutist Regimes, Debin Ma, Jared Rubin
ESI Working Papers
Tax extraction in Qing China was low relative to Western Europe. It is not obvious why: China was much more absolutist and had stronger rights over property and people. Why did the Chinese not convert their absolute power into revenue? We propose a model, supported by historical evidence, which suggests that i) the center could not ask its tax collecting agents to levy high taxes because it would incentivize agents to overtax the peasantry; ii) the center could not pay agents high wages in return for high taxes because the center had no mechanism to commit to refrain from confiscating …
Causes And Consequences Of The Protestant Reformation, Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff, Jared Rubin
Causes And Consequences Of The Protestant Reformation, Sascha O. Becker, Steven Pfaff, Jared Rubin
ESI Working Papers
The Protestant Reformation is one of the defining events of the last millennium. Nearly 500 years after the Reformation, its causes and consequences have seen a renewed interest in the social sciences. Research in economics, sociology, and political science increasingly uses detailed individual-level, city-level, and regional-level data to identify drivers of the adoption of the Reformation, its diffusion pattern, and its socioeconomic consequences. This survey takes stock of the research so far, tries to point out what we know and what we do not know, and which are the most promising areas for future research.