Tibor Rutar
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 297058 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Tibor Rutar |
| NOMBRES | Tibor |
| APELLIDO | Rutar |
| FIRMA | RUTAR T |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Maribor |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5022-0373 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2017 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Trade unions are not zero-sum
Stronger, denser unions have consistently been linked to reduced income inequality and higher wages within and across societies. For various reasons, but especially due to data availability, most existing research on this topic is limited to small samples of developed countries. More importantly, not a lot is known about the precise composition of the inequality-reducing effect of unions. Do reductions in inequality (and increases in wages) come …
No causal evidence that free markets and globalization reduce homicide
There has been a recent boom in cross-national criminological research on the topic of free markets, globalization, and homicidal violence. Much of this new literature reports negative associations and suggests that open markets and globalization ameliorate homicide. However, the research relies on correlational panel regressions and occasionally dubious instrumental variables, leaving endogeneity unresolved. This paper re-examines the issue usin…
Misperceiving inequality
In scholarly outlets and adjacent venues, including policy briefs and reports by influential non-government organizations, it is often claimed that income and wealth inequality have risen sharply and continuously over the past decades. This rise is frequently attributed to macro-social processes such as globalization and market liberalization (often discussed as neoliberalism). It is also commonly argued that inequality, especially when high and …
Do large, sustained economic freedom reforms hurt or improve women's economic rights
Does economic freedom come at the expense of women's economic rights, or does it instead help improve them? Presently, there are almost no studies investigating this issue, and what evidence exists is mostly correlational. This paper presents findings from matching analyses with the explicit aim of addressing the likely endogenous relationship between economic freedom and respect for women's economic rights. Using the latest data (up to 2022), es…
Individualist and Collectivist Cultures, and the Welfare State
Cultural differences between societies have turned out to be crucial determinants of various salient political-economic processes, including economic development and governance. The persistent, deeply historically rooted individualism-collectivism divide is especially important in this respect. But does this cultural cleavage also matter for the size of the modern welfare state? Theoretically, the issue seems undetermined. On one side, critical s…
Guns do kill people
Does economic freedom push people into suicide? New evidence from developing and developed societies, 1980-2019
This research paper investigates the impact of market liberalization on country-level suicide rates using a sample of 96 developing and developed countries from 1980 to 2019. We estimate fixed-effects panel regression models with robust standard errors clustered at the country level and conduct a variety of robustness checks, including using different estimators and disaggregating the data. We consistently find that the aggregate Economic Freedom…
Neoliberalism and Globalization Are Not Undermining Democracy
The rise of neoliberal reforms in the period of globalization is often claimed to be linked with wider outcomes, such as increased inequality, unemployment, and different cultural grievances. Because of these economic and cultural concerns, voters might seek solutions to their ostensible problems by turning to illiberal populist parties, which tend to undermine democracy and its basic principles. The present article empirically tests if neolibera…
Liberal economic institutions reduce relative poverty only in developed, individualist societies
Liberal economic institutions – such as secure property rights, modest regulation, and free international trade – seem to boost economic development, but how do they relate to relative poverty? Surprisingly, given the social salience of this question in the age of globalization, there is almost no comprehensive research using global panel data and aggregate indices of economic freedom to investigate it. We construct such a dataset with 139 countr…
Do societies with freer markets really become less homicidal over time? New evidence from 131 developed and developing societies, 2000–2021
Free-market institutions and income inequality
High or rising economic inequality can exacerbate political inequalities and is plausibly linked with some social harms, such as health problems and declines in happiness and trust. Within-country income inequality increased sharply across most of the world since the 1980s. One prominent critical sociological account of this occurrence points toward institutions of free-market capitalism, or “neoliberalism,” as a key cause that unleashed inequali…
Re-examining extreme poverty before and after the transition to capitalism, 1300s–1900s
The ‘standard narrative’ about capitalism and extreme poverty holds that the transition to the former was associated with a staggering reduction of the latter. Recently, this has been strongly called into question by a critical narrative grounded in a battery of non-GDP-based measures of extreme poverty and living standards, such as subsistence welfare ratios, skeletal height data, and famine reports. This critical narrative holds that extreme-po…
Establishing an inverted U-shaped pattern of violence and war from prehistory to modernity
How have broad patterns of violence and war changed from the dawn of humanity up to present time? In answering this question, researchers have typically framed their arguments and evidence in terms of the polarized debate between Hobbes (or hawks) and Rousseau (or doves). This article moves beyond the stalemated debate and integrates the most robust existing theoretical developments and empirical findings that have emerged from various discipline…
Free-Market Capitalism’ and Democracy in the Period of Democratic Recession
Since the mid-2000s, democratization has slowed, stopped, and even reversed across the world. At the same time, societies have become more oriented toward free markets as measured by indexes of economic freedom. Relying on a panel sample of 141 developed and developing countries between 2006 and 2017, this paper is the first to investigate whether the two phenomena are related by employing economic freedom data. It finds that there is no net-nega…
The prehistory of violence and war
This article presents and critically assesses the latest anthropological and archaeological research on the chronology, lethality, and frequency of violence and war in human history. Stepping back from the rhetorically polarized dispute between 'Hobbesians' and 'Rousseauans', the article examines the methods and findings of the latest research in a conceptually novel way, i.e. by dropping the existing and widely used polarized terms that have ine…
What is neoliberalism really? A global analysis of its real-world consequences for development, inequality, and democracy
The notion that the world has been witnessing a profound neoliberal transformation since around the 1980s onward is widely accepted in many parts of social science and the humanities. Moreover, the overarching impression is that this transformation has mostly been regrettable in economic, political, and other social terms. At the same time, careful interdisciplinary research recently uncovered that neoliberalism has been notoriously hard to defin…
Capitalism for Realists
Break-up of the Yugoslav political elite, 1962-1972
The break-up of the Yugoslav communist elite, which came about in the period 1962-1972, is considered. The break-up came about under the elite?s disappointment due to the failure to achieve economic objectives it set for itself, bringing about internal dubiety and mutual suspicion, the political system moving towards consociation also contributed to fracturing. However, this is not sufficient as explanation. Cultural elites also contributed in th…
Sociological limits and prospects of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory
What can sociology learn about the logic of social behaviour from the field of cultural evolution? How can sociology enrich cultural evolutionary theory? In this article, I present and examine cultural evolutionary theory by specifying its various proposed mechanisms, such as cultural drift, biased transmission and cultural selection (including cultural group selection), and by investigating concrete examples of social phenomena to which the theo…
Rational Choice and Democratic Government
Why Do Political Elites Fracture? The Unusual Case of the Yugoslav Communist Elite
After World War II, Yugoslavia as a state was reconstituted by a small communist elite. Since this was an ideocratic rule, ideology was taken seriously by the elite and treated enthusiastically. One of the elite's initial goals was to speedily develop Yugoslavia, so that a Western level of economic development be achieved. Economic disparities among regions were also to have been overcome. For various reasons, this objective was never close to be…
Varieties of 'rationality' and the question of their continued theoretical relevance
The notion of 'rationality' has always been one of the more controversial social-scientific ideas. Today there exist many conceptual varieties of rationality which are often less than clearly distinguished and the precise intellectual import of which likewise tends to be opaque. In this article I draw on classical and contemporary examples from sociology, political science and economics in the effort to clarify the many meanings of the notion and…
Defending the role of rationality in the social sciences, rationally
Peter T. Leeson and Tobias Wolbring agree with me that rationality, properly clarified, should continue to assume an important theoretical role in modern social science. We disagree, however, about the precise extent of its role. In my reply to the debate I focus on two related issues that have emerged. First, can and should the concepts of rationality, or rational choice theory (RCT) more generally, be employed as something more than just one to…
For an integrative theory of social behaviour
Most sociologists are not content with merely relating macrosocial phenomena to preceding macrosocial causes in their causal explanations of social phenomena. Instead they are seeking to provide (non‐reductive) microfoundations with which they can corroborate and make understandable the connection between macrosocial phenomena. In order to do so a theory (or theories) of human action is required. One such theory, rational choice theory (RCT), has…
The Transition Debate Today
Spencer Dimmock has produced a convincing restatement, defence and update of Robert Brenner’s influential work on the origin of capitalism in England. The book productively engages with many Marxist and non-Marxist critics of the so-called ‘Brenner Thesis’, and presents fresh secondary and primary evidence in favour of it. This review sketches the theoretical background of Brenner’s intervention, summarises Dimmock’s take on Brenner, and comments…
What is neoliberalism really? A global analysis of its real-world consequences for development, inequality, and democracy
The notion that the world has been witnessing a profound neoliberal transformation since around the 1980s onward is widely accepted in many parts of social science and the humanities. Moreover, the overarching impression is that this transformation has mostly been regrettable in economic, political, and other social terms. At the same time, careful interdisciplinary research recently uncovered that neoliberalism has been notoriously hard to defin…
Free-Market Capitalism’ and Democracy in the Period of Democratic Recession
Since the mid-2000s, democratization has slowed, stopped, and even reversed across the world. At the same time, societies have become more oriented toward free markets as measured by indexes of economic freedom. Relying on a panel sample of 141 developed and developing countries between 2006 and 2017, this paper is the first to investigate whether the two phenomena are related by employing economic freedom data. It finds that there is no net-nega…
For an integrative theory of social behaviour
Most sociologists are not content with merely relating macrosocial phenomena to preceding macrosocial causes in their causal explanations of social phenomena. Instead they are seeking to provide (non‐reductive) microfoundations with which they can corroborate and make understandable the connection between macrosocial phenomena. In order to do so a theory (or theories) of human action is required. One such theory, rational choice theory (RCT), has…
Do societies with freer markets really become less homicidal over time? New evidence from 131 developed and developing societies, 2000–2021
The prehistory of violence and war
This article presents and critically assesses the latest anthropological and archaeological research on the chronology, lethality, and frequency of violence and war in human history. Stepping back from the rhetorically polarized dispute between 'Hobbesians' and 'Rousseauans', the article examines the methods and findings of the latest research in a conceptually novel way, i.e. by dropping the existing and widely used polarized terms that have ine…
Does economic freedom push people into suicide? New evidence from developing and developed societies, 1980-2019
This research paper investigates the impact of market liberalization on country-level suicide rates using a sample of 96 developing and developed countries from 1980 to 2019. We estimate fixed-effects panel regression models with robust standard errors clustered at the country level and conduct a variety of robustness checks, including using different estimators and disaggregating the data. We consistently find that the aggregate Economic Freedom…
Neoliberalism and Globalization Are Not Undermining Democracy
The rise of neoliberal reforms in the period of globalization is often claimed to be linked with wider outcomes, such as increased inequality, unemployment, and different cultural grievances. Because of these economic and cultural concerns, voters might seek solutions to their ostensible problems by turning to illiberal populist parties, which tend to undermine democracy and its basic principles. The present article empirically tests if neolibera…
Free-market institutions and income inequality
High or rising economic inequality can exacerbate political inequalities and is plausibly linked with some social harms, such as health problems and declines in happiness and trust. Within-country income inequality increased sharply across most of the world since the 1980s. One prominent critical sociological account of this occurrence points toward institutions of free-market capitalism, or “neoliberalism,” as a key cause that unleashed inequali…
Varieties of 'rationality' and the question of their continued theoretical relevance
The notion of 'rationality' has always been one of the more controversial social-scientific ideas. Today there exist many conceptual varieties of rationality which are often less than clearly distinguished and the precise intellectual import of which likewise tends to be opaque. In this article I draw on classical and contemporary examples from sociology, political science and economics in the effort to clarify the many meanings of the notion and…
Defending the role of rationality in the social sciences, rationally
Peter T. Leeson and Tobias Wolbring agree with me that rationality, properly clarified, should continue to assume an important theoretical role in modern social science. We disagree, however, about the precise extent of its role. In my reply to the debate I focus on two related issues that have emerged. First, can and should the concepts of rationality, or rational choice theory (RCT) more generally, be employed as something more than just one to…
Clarifying Power, Domination, and Exploitation
The paper examines two ubiquitous concepts of power: the "classical sociological" concept which draws on Max Weber's definition of power, and the "Foucauldian" concept which stems from Michel Foucault's genealogical works. Three main theses are argued for. First, the two concepts are not, in most respects, as radically different as it is usually claimed. It is demonstrated that both can make room for different sources of power, for understanding …
The Transition Debate Today
Spencer Dimmock has produced a convincing restatement, defence and update of Robert Brenner’s influential work on the origin of capitalism in England. The book productively engages with many Marxist and non-Marxist critics of the so-called ‘Brenner Thesis’, and presents fresh secondary and primary evidence in favour of it. This review sketches the theoretical background of Brenner’s intervention, summarises Dimmock’s take on Brenner, and comments…
For an integrative theory of social behaviour
Most sociologists are not content with merely relating macrosocial phenomena to preceding macrosocial causes in their causal explanations of social phenomena. Instead they are seeking to provide (non‐reductive) microfoundations with which they can corroborate and make understandable the connection between macrosocial phenomena. In order to do so a theory (or theories) of human action is required. One such theory, rational choice theory (RCT), has…
Varieties of 'rationality' and the question of their continued theoretical relevance
The notion of 'rationality' has always been one of the more controversial social-scientific ideas. Today there exist many conceptual varieties of rationality which are often less than clearly distinguished and the precise intellectual import of which likewise tends to be opaque. In this article I draw on classical and contemporary examples from sociology, political science and economics in the effort to clarify the many meanings of the notion and…
Defending the role of rationality in the social sciences, rationally
Peter T. Leeson and Tobias Wolbring agree with me that rationality, properly clarified, should continue to assume an important theoretical role in modern social science. We disagree, however, about the precise extent of its role. In my reply to the debate I focus on two related issues that have emerged. First, can and should the concepts of rationality, or rational choice theory (RCT) more generally, be employed as something more than just one to…
Break-up of the Yugoslav political elite, 1962-1972
The break-up of the Yugoslav communist elite, which came about in the period 1962-1972, is considered. The break-up came about under the elite?s disappointment due to the failure to achieve economic objectives it set for itself, bringing about internal dubiety and mutual suspicion, the political system moving towards consociation also contributed to fracturing. However, this is not sufficient as explanation. Cultural elites also contributed in th…
Sociological limits and prospects of contemporary cultural evolutionary theory
What can sociology learn about the logic of social behaviour from the field of cultural evolution? How can sociology enrich cultural evolutionary theory? In this article, I present and examine cultural evolutionary theory by specifying its various proposed mechanisms, such as cultural drift, biased transmission and cultural selection (including cultural group selection), and by investigating concrete examples of social phenomena to which the theo…
Rational Choice and Democratic Government
Why Do Political Elites Fracture? The Unusual Case of the Yugoslav Communist Elite
After World War II, Yugoslavia as a state was reconstituted by a small communist elite. Since this was an ideocratic rule, ideology was taken seriously by the elite and treated enthusiastically. One of the elite's initial goals was to speedily develop Yugoslavia, so that a Western level of economic development be achieved. Economic disparities among regions were also to have been overcome. For various reasons, this objective was never close to be…
Capitalism for Realists
Free-Market Capitalism’ and Democracy in the Period of Democratic Recession
Since the mid-2000s, democratization has slowed, stopped, and even reversed across the world. At the same time, societies have become more oriented toward free markets as measured by indexes of economic freedom. Relying on a panel sample of 141 developed and developing countries between 2006 and 2017, this paper is the first to investigate whether the two phenomena are related by employing economic freedom data. It finds that there is no net-nega…
The prehistory of violence and war
This article presents and critically assesses the latest anthropological and archaeological research on the chronology, lethality, and frequency of violence and war in human history. Stepping back from the rhetorically polarized dispute between 'Hobbesians' and 'Rousseauans', the article examines the methods and findings of the latest research in a conceptually novel way, i.e. by dropping the existing and widely used polarized terms that have ine…
What is neoliberalism really? A global analysis of its real-world consequences for development, inequality, and democracy
The notion that the world has been witnessing a profound neoliberal transformation since around the 1980s onward is widely accepted in many parts of social science and the humanities. Moreover, the overarching impression is that this transformation has mostly been regrettable in economic, political, and other social terms. At the same time, careful interdisciplinary research recently uncovered that neoliberalism has been notoriously hard to defin…
Do societies with freer markets really become less homicidal over time? New evidence from 131 developed and developing societies, 2000–2021
Free-market institutions and income inequality
High or rising economic inequality can exacerbate political inequalities and is plausibly linked with some social harms, such as health problems and declines in happiness and trust. Within-country income inequality increased sharply across most of the world since the 1980s. One prominent critical sociological account of this occurrence points toward institutions of free-market capitalism, or “neoliberalism,” as a key cause that unleashed inequali…
Re-examining extreme poverty before and after the transition to capitalism, 1300s–1900s
The ‘standard narrative’ about capitalism and extreme poverty holds that the transition to the former was associated with a staggering reduction of the latter. Recently, this has been strongly called into question by a critical narrative grounded in a battery of non-GDP-based measures of extreme poverty and living standards, such as subsistence welfare ratios, skeletal height data, and famine reports. This critical narrative holds that extreme-po…
Establishing an inverted U-shaped pattern of violence and war from prehistory to modernity
How have broad patterns of violence and war changed from the dawn of humanity up to present time? In answering this question, researchers have typically framed their arguments and evidence in terms of the polarized debate between Hobbes (or hawks) and Rousseau (or doves). This article moves beyond the stalemated debate and integrates the most robust existing theoretical developments and empirical findings that have emerged from various discipline…
Do large, sustained economic freedom reforms hurt or improve women's economic rights
Does economic freedom come at the expense of women's economic rights, or does it instead help improve them? Presently, there are almost no studies investigating this issue, and what evidence exists is mostly correlational. This paper presents findings from matching analyses with the explicit aim of addressing the likely endogenous relationship between economic freedom and respect for women's economic rights. Using the latest data (up to 2022), es…
Individualist and Collectivist Cultures, and the Welfare State
Cultural differences between societies have turned out to be crucial determinants of various salient political-economic processes, including economic development and governance. The persistent, deeply historically rooted individualism-collectivism divide is especially important in this respect. But does this cultural cleavage also matter for the size of the modern welfare state? Theoretically, the issue seems undetermined. On one side, critical s…
Guns do kill people
Does economic freedom push people into suicide? New evidence from developing and developed societies, 1980-2019
This research paper investigates the impact of market liberalization on country-level suicide rates using a sample of 96 developing and developed countries from 1980 to 2019. We estimate fixed-effects panel regression models with robust standard errors clustered at the country level and conduct a variety of robustness checks, including using different estimators and disaggregating the data. We consistently find that the aggregate Economic Freedom…
Neoliberalism and Globalization Are Not Undermining Democracy
The rise of neoliberal reforms in the period of globalization is often claimed to be linked with wider outcomes, such as increased inequality, unemployment, and different cultural grievances. Because of these economic and cultural concerns, voters might seek solutions to their ostensible problems by turning to illiberal populist parties, which tend to undermine democracy and its basic principles. The present article empirically tests if neolibera…
Liberal economic institutions reduce relative poverty only in developed, individualist societies
Liberal economic institutions – such as secure property rights, modest regulation, and free international trade – seem to boost economic development, but how do they relate to relative poverty? Surprisingly, given the social salience of this question in the age of globalization, there is almost no comprehensive research using global panel data and aggregate indices of economic freedom to investigate it. We construct such a dataset with 139 countr…
Trade unions are not zero-sum
Stronger, denser unions have consistently been linked to reduced income inequality and higher wages within and across societies. For various reasons, but especially due to data availability, most existing research on this topic is limited to small samples of developed countries. More importantly, not a lot is known about the precise composition of the inequality-reducing effect of unions. Do reductions in inequality (and increases in wages) come …
No causal evidence that free markets and globalization reduce homicide
There has been a recent boom in cross-national criminological research on the topic of free markets, globalization, and homicidal violence. Much of this new literature reports negative associations and suggests that open markets and globalization ameliorate homicide. However, the research relies on correlational panel regressions and occasionally dubious instrumental variables, leaving endogeneity unresolved. This paper re-examines the issue usin…
Economics (15 obras) · Sociology (15 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Development economics (9 obras) · Politics (8 obras) · Epistemology (7 obras) · Philosophy (6 obras) · Political economy (6 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (4 obras)