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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante Jan 2009

Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante

Research Collection School Of Economics

In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. We argue and demonstrate with historical evidence that the concentration of population around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index …


Instability And The Incentives For Corruption, Filipe R. Campante, Davin Chor, Quoc-Anh Do Jan 2009

Instability And The Incentives For Corruption, Filipe R. Campante, Davin Chor, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate the relationship between corruption and political stability, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. We propose a model of incumbent behavior that features the interplay of two effects: a horizon effect, whereby greater instability leads the incumbent to embezzle more during his short window of opportunity, and a demand effect, by which the private sector is more willing to bribe stable incumbents. The horizon effect dominates at low levels of stability, because firms are unwilling to pay high bribes and unstable incumbents have strong incentives to embezzle, whereas the demand effect gains salience in more stable regimes. Together, these …


Extreme Neo-Liberalism: An Introduction, Stefano Harney Jan 2009

Extreme Neo-Liberalism: An Introduction, Stefano Harney

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

During the Historical Materialism Conference (2009), Stefano Harney gave a talk within an ephemerasession on ‘Politics in the Business School’ which we organised in preparation for this special issue. Thispiece offers a full transcription of that talk and is prefaced here by some introductory remarks fromStefano. The question and answer session which followed the talk has also been made available online asan audio file. Special thanks are due to Demet Dimler for inviting ephemera to organise a session atHistorical Materialism, to Matteo Mandarini for chairing the session, to Tim Edkins for recording thesession and to Alison Shalaby for transcribing the …