Carles Boix
Biographic Data
| ID | 994101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carles Boix |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carles |
| FAMILY NAME | Boix |
| SIGNATURE | BOIX C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2154-2701 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2167 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Resilient Democracies
The Church as Arbiter: A Divided Right in Interwar France
To document the impact of elites’ choices on political movements, we leverage the condemnation of L’Action Française (AF), a monarchist movement, by Pope Pius XI in 1926. As a consequence of the papal condemnation, French Catholics had to choose between their involvement in AF and accessing Catholic sacraments. Difference-in-differences estimates show that the papal condemnation reshaped AF’s territorial distribution and social basis, weakening i…
Political Emancipation and Modern Jewish National Identity
Following the rise of liberalism and nationalism during the nineteenth century, Jewish national identity varied across countries. While Western European and American Jews mainly came to think of themselves as nationals of their country of citizenship, a growing number of Eastern European Jews claimed to be a separate nation with a legitimate claim to self-government. Comparing the evolution of Jewish identities across North America and Europe and…
Turnout, Family, and Gender Norms: The Political Incorporation of Women in Sweden, 1921–1960
This article investigates the historical process through which women mobilized at the ballot box and caught up with men's high voting turnout. The authors employ a unique set of official electoral data in Sweden collected between 1921 and 1960, recording all eligible voters' participation by gender, occupational group, and marital status. Although, in line with standard models of turnout, women's individual resources mattered, the authors show ho…
Social Democracy and the Birth of Working-Class Representation in Europe
Despite the growing interest in the economic backgrounds of mps in Western Europe, the evolution of working-class numerical representation before 1945 has not been systematically studied. Using data from England and Wales (1832–1944), Germany (1871–1930), and Norway (1906–1936), the authors show both that working-class mps were elected when barriers were lowered and that almost all working-class parliamentarians were affiliated with socialist par…
The Rise of Swedish Social Democracy
We examine the rise and mobilizational dynamics of social democracy, employing data reported by the Swedish authorities on the distribution of voting eligibility, turnout and partisan vote in local elections during the 1910s at a high level of disaggregation (by narrow income segments and administrative units). In line with the existing literature, we show that electoral socialism depended on both the extension of the suffrage to its ‘natural’ el…
Response to Torben Iversen and David Soskice’s review of Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads: Technological Change and the Future of Politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
From Political Mobilization to Electoral Participation: Turnout in Barcelona in the 1930s
This article examines the process of electoral mobilization that follows the extension of voting rights to low-income citizens. We take advantage of a historically unique panel data set of official registers that includes individual voting roll calls as well as individual demographics of almost 25,000 electors in Barcelona in the 1930s, matched with relevant precinct-level socioeconomic, political, and geographical data. We show that voting was d…
Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads: Technological Change and the Future of Politics
The twentieth century witnessed the triumph of democratic capitalism in the industrialised West, with widespread support emerging for free markets and representative elections. Yet in the last two decades, this political consensus has been disrupted by growing inequality, dissatisfaction with democratic institutions, and the rise of populism. Carles Boix examines how these developments and new technological innovations are changing the relationsh…
Endogenous Parliaments: The Domestic and International Roots of Long-Term Economic Growth and Executive Constraints in Europe
Institutional constraints on executive behavior are commonly understood to be crucial constitutional features that limit state expropriation, protect property rights, and promote economic development. Combining new data describing the presence of parliamentary constraints for the entire European continent with data on city sizes, we build upon theories of endogenous economic growth to demonstrate that paths of both economic and political developm…
Response to Francis Fukuyama’s review of Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and Their Consequences for Human Welfare
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Political Order and Inequality: Their Foundations and their Consequences for Human Welfare
The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing it? Or do we need a state to live together? This problem then opens up two further questions. If a state is necessary to establish order, how does it come into place? And, when it does, what are the consequences for the politica…
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democraci…
Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality
Human osteological data provide a rich, still-to-be-mined source of information about the distribution of nutrition and, by extension, the distribution of political power and economic wealth in societies of long ago. On the basis of data we have collected and analyzed on societies ranging from foraging communities to the ancient Egyptian and modern European monarchies, we find that the shift from hunting and gathering to complex fishing technique…
Overview of Comparative Politics
This article discusses several crucial questions that comparative political scientists address. These questions also form part of the basis of the current volume. The article first studies the theory and methods used in gathering data and evidence, and then focuses on the concepts of states, state formation, and political consent. Political regimes, political conflict, mass political mobilization, and political instability are other topics examin…
The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions, Commitment, and Power-Sharing in Dictatorships
Why do some dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We argue that institutions promote the survival of dictatorships by facilitating authoritarian power-sharing. Specifically, institutions such as parties, legislatures, and advisory councils alleviate commitment and monitoring problems between the dictator and his allies caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. However, because authoritarian power-sharing …
A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007
This article updates and describes a widely used data set on democracy. Covering 1800–2007 and 219 countries, it represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently available. We argue that our measure’s distinguishing features—a concrete, dichotomous coding and a long time span—are of critical value to empirical work on democracy. Inspired by Robert Dahl, we define a country as democratic if it satisfies conditions for b…
Democracy, Development, and the International System
Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations. The estimations hold after I control for country …
Origins and Persistence of Economic Inequality
After reviewing the current literature on the causes of economic inequality, the article models the historical emergence of inequality as the result of a key technological change (i.e., the adoption of agriculture) that widened income differentials and led to the construction of state institutions, which shaped (depending on their particular nature, more or less authoritarian) the final distribution of economic assets within and across different …
Electoral Markets, Party Strategies, and Proportional Representation
Following Kreuzer's (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key "moments" in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the interests of different parties toward proportional represen…
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method, the use of history, the practice and status of case-study research, and the contributions of f…
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics Oxford Handbooks of Political Science
The Conditional Relationship between Inequality and Development
In recent years political scientists and economists have spent considerable efforts investigating the impact of income inequality both on political institutions and social conflict (Boix 2003, 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Geddes 2007) and on growth and development (Atkinson and Bourguignon 2000). In this article I focus on the latter question: I discuss the extent to which (that is, the conditions under which) inequality may hinder economic …
Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World
To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally…
Democracy and Redistribution
When do countries democratize? What facilitates the survival of authoritarian regimes? What determines the occurrence of revolutions, often leading to left-wing dictatorships, such as the Soviet regime? Although a large literature has developed since Aristotle through contemporary political science to answer these questions, we still lack a convincing understanding of the process of political development. Employing analytical tools borrowed from …
A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800–2007
This article updates and describes a widely used data set on democracy. Covering 1800–2007 and 219 countries, it represents the most comprehensive dichotomous measure of democracy currently available. We argue that our measure’s distinguishing features—a concrete, dichotomous coding and a long time span—are of critical value to empirical work on democracy. Inspired by Robert Dahl, we define a country as democratic if it satisfies conditions for b…
The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions, Commitment, and Power-Sharing in Dictatorships
Why do some dictatorships establish institutions that may constrain their leaders? We argue that institutions promote the survival of dictatorships by facilitating authoritarian power-sharing. Specifically, institutions such as parties, legislatures, and advisory councils alleviate commitment and monitoring problems between the dictator and his allies caused by the secrecy in authoritarian governance. However, because authoritarian power-sharing …
Endogenous Democratization
The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his associates, that development causes democracy to last but not to come into existence in the first place. By dealing adequately with problems of sample selection and model specification, the authors discover that economic growth does cause nondemocracies to democratiz…
Setting the Rules of the Game: The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies
Looking at the history of democracies in the developed world, I show that electoral systems derive from the decisions the ruling parties make to maximize their representation according to the following conditions. As long as the electoral arena does not change and the current electoral regime benefits the ruling parties, the electoral system is not altered. As the electoral arena changes (due to the entry of new voters or a change in voters' pref…
Democracy, Development, and the International System
Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations. The estimations hold after I control for country …
Social Capital: Explaining Its Origins and Effects on Government Performance
With the rise of analytical or positive approaches to the study of politics over the last three decades, the collective action problem has emerged as one of the central concepts in political science. The concept's widespread acceptance as a descriptive and diagnostic tool, however, cannot obscure the fact that its predictions do not always hold. Co-operation sometimes does take place in contexts where, according to the theory, actors should have …
Trade, Democracy, and the Size of the Public Sector: The Political Underpinnings of Openness
Politics remains prominently absent in the literature showing that higher levels of trade integration lead to a larger public sector. As openness increases, the state, acting as a social planner, adopts a salient role to minimize the risks of economic integration and secure social peace. Given the highly redistributive nature of both trade and fiscal policies, we claim, however, that the interaction of the international economy and domestic polit…
Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World
To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally…
Partisan Governments, the International Economy, and Macroeconomic Policies in Advanced Nations, 1960–93
This article examines the impact of parties, domestic institutions, and the international economy on the conduct of monetary and fiscal policies using time-series cross-section data from nineteen OECD countries for the years between 1960 and the mid-1990s. The results are as follows. Partisan governments have affected, alone and in interaction with the organization of labor markets, the pattern of macroeconomic management. Still, their impact has…
Democracy, Development, and the Public Sector
This article develops a model that describes the growth of the public sector as a joint result of the process of economic development and the political institutions in place. The model is tested using panel data for about sixty five developing and developed nations for the period 195090. Economic modernization leads to the growth of the public sector through two mechanisms: first, the state intervenes to provide certain collective goods such as r…
Political Parties and the Supply Side of the Economy: The Provision of Physical and Human Capital in Advanced Economies, 1960-90
Theory: Partisan tenure of government (in contrast to institutionalist and structural approaches) is used to explain the nature of governmental strategies to affect the supply side of the economy-the provision of the input factors, capital and labor. Hypotheses: Supply-side economic strategies are a function of the party in office. Left-wing governments spend heavily in physical and human capital formation to raise the productivity of factors and…
Privatizing the Public Business Sector in the Eighties: Economic Performance, Partisan Responses and Divided Governments
From the late 1970s on, after several decades characterized by relatively interventionist patterns of economic policy making, most advanced states began questioning and, in some instances, abandoning active industrial policies and privatizing public businesses. Examining the evolution of the public business sector in all nations included in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1979 to 1993, this article shows tha…
Electoral Markets, Party Strategies, and Proportional Representation
Following Kreuzer's (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key "moments" in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the interests of different parties toward proportional represen…
Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality
Human osteological data provide a rich, still-to-be-mined source of information about the distribution of nutrition and, by extension, the distribution of political power and economic wealth in societies of long ago. On the basis of data we have collected and analyzed on societies ranging from foraging communities to the ancient Egyptian and modern European monarchies, we find that the shift from hunting and gathering to complex fishing technique…
Endogenous Parliaments: The Domestic and International Roots of Long-Term Economic Growth and Executive Constraints in Europe
Institutional constraints on executive behavior are commonly understood to be crucial constitutional features that limit state expropriation, protect property rights, and promote economic development. Combining new data describing the presence of parliamentary constraints for the entire European continent with data on city sizes, we build upon theories of endogenous economic growth to demonstrate that paths of both economic and political developm…
Origins and Persistence of Economic Inequality
After reviewing the current literature on the causes of economic inequality, the article models the historical emergence of inequality as the result of a key technological change (i.e., the adoption of agriculture) that widened income differentials and led to the construction of state institutions, which shaped (depending on their particular nature, more or less authoritarian) the final distribution of economic assets within and across different …
From Political Mobilization to Electoral Participation: Turnout in Barcelona in the 1930s
This article examines the process of electoral mobilization that follows the extension of voting rights to low-income citizens. We take advantage of a historically unique panel data set of official registers that includes individual voting roll calls as well as individual demographics of almost 25,000 electors in Barcelona in the 1930s, matched with relevant precinct-level socioeconomic, political, and geographical data. We show that voting was d…
Las bases sociales y políticas de la abstención en las elecciones generales españolas: Recursos Individuales, Movilización Estratégica E Instituciones Electorales
Este informe de investigación examina los factores sociales y políticos que han determinado el nivel y variabilidad de la abstención electoral en las elecciones generales españolas. Extendiendo los modelos de carácter psicológico y sociológico que se han empleado (con éxito relativo) para explicar la abstención española, este estudio muestra que el nivel de participación en las elecciones generales depende en buena medida de factores estrictament…
Partisan voting in the Spanish 1986 Nato referendum: An ecological analysis
The Conditional Relationship between Inequality and Development
In recent years political scientists and economists have spent considerable efforts investigating the impact of income inequality both on political institutions and social conflict (Boix 2003, 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Geddes 2007) and on growth and development (Atkinson and Bourguignon 2000). In this article I focus on the latter question: I discuss the extent to which (that is, the conditions under which) inequality may hinder economic …
Political Emancipation and Modern Jewish National Identity
Following the rise of liberalism and nationalism during the nineteenth century, Jewish national identity varied across countries. While Western European and American Jews mainly came to think of themselves as nationals of their country of citizenship, a growing number of Eastern European Jews claimed to be a separate nation with a legitimate claim to self-government. Comparing the evolution of Jewish identities across North America and Europe and…
Social Democracy and the Birth of Working-Class Representation in Europe
Despite the growing interest in the economic backgrounds of mps in Western Europe, the evolution of working-class numerical representation before 1945 has not been systematically studied. Using data from England and Wales (1832–1944), Germany (1871–1930), and Norway (1906–1936), the authors show both that working-class mps were elected when barriers were lowered and that almost all working-class parliamentarians were affiliated with socialist par…
The Rise of Swedish Social Democracy
We examine the rise and mobilizational dynamics of social democracy, employing data reported by the Swedish authorities on the distribution of voting eligibility, turnout and partisan vote in local elections during the 1910s at a high level of disaggregation (by narrow income segments and administrative units). In line with the existing literature, we show that electoral socialism depended on both the extension of the suffrage to its ‘natural’ el…
Managing the Spanish Economy within Europe
This article explores the economic policies developed by the Spanish socialist government from 1982 to 1996, particularly with an eye on the impact the process of European integration had on them. The introduction of stable macroeconomic policies, in the form of high interest rates, is traced to the interaction of three factors. First, an increasingly internationalized economy, reinforced by the European single market and monetary union projects,…
Partisan voting in the Spanish 1986 Nato referendum: An ecological analysis
Spain's Economy in the Last Forty Years: Between Growth and Unemployment
1997). Spain's Economy in the Last Forty Years: Between Growth and Unemployment. South European Society and Politics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 139-145
Privatizing the Public Business Sector in the Eighties: Economic Performance, Partisan Responses and Divided Governments
From the late 1970s on, after several decades characterized by relatively interventionist patterns of economic policy making, most advanced states began questioning and, in some instances, abandoning active industrial policies and privatizing public businesses. Examining the evolution of the public business sector in all nations included in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 1979 to 1993, this article shows tha…
Political Parties and the Supply Side of the Economy: The Provision of Physical and Human Capital in Advanced Economies, 1960-90
Theory: Partisan tenure of government (in contrast to institutionalist and structural approaches) is used to explain the nature of governmental strategies to affect the supply side of the economy-the provision of the input factors, capital and labor. Hypotheses: Supply-side economic strategies are a function of the party in office. Left-wing governments spend heavily in physical and human capital formation to raise the productivity of factors and…
Political Parties, Growth and Equality: Conservative and Social Democratic Economic Strategies in the World Economy
Given the increased openness of countries to international trade and financial flows, the general public and the scholarly literature have grown skeptical about the capacity of policy-makers to affect economic performance. Challenging this view, Political Parties, Growth, and Equality shows that the increasingly interdependent world economy and recent technological shocks have actually exacerbated the dilemmas faced by governments in choosing amo…
Social Capital: Explaining Its Origins and Effects on Government Performance
With the rise of analytical or positive approaches to the study of politics over the last three decades, the collective action problem has emerged as one of the central concepts in political science. The concept's widespread acceptance as a descriptive and diagnostic tool, however, cannot obscure the fact that its predictions do not always hold. Co-operation sometimes does take place in contexts where, according to the theory, actors should have …
Setting the Rules of the Game: The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies
Looking at the history of democracies in the developed world, I show that electoral systems derive from the decisions the ruling parties make to maximize their representation according to the following conditions. As long as the electoral arena does not change and the current electoral regime benefits the ruling parties, the electoral system is not altered. As the electoral arena changes (due to the entry of new voters or a change in voters' pref…
Setting the Rules of the Game: The Choice of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies
Managing the Spanish Economy within Europe
This article explores the economic policies developed by the Spanish socialist government from 1982 to 1996, particularly with an eye on the impact the process of European integration had on them. The introduction of stable macroeconomic policies, in the form of high interest rates, is traced to the interaction of three factors. First, an increasingly internationalized economy, reinforced by the European single market and monetary union projects,…
Partisan Governments, the International Economy, and Macroeconomic Policies in Advanced Nations, 1960–93
This article examines the impact of parties, domestic institutions, and the international economy on the conduct of monetary and fiscal policies using time-series cross-section data from nineteen OECD countries for the years between 1960 and the mid-1990s. The results are as follows. Partisan governments have affected, alone and in interaction with the organization of labor markets, the pattern of macroeconomic management. Still, their impact has…
Las bases sociales y políticas de la abstención en las elecciones generales españolas: Recursos Individuales, Movilización Estratégica E Instituciones Electorales
Este informe de investigación examina los factores sociales y políticos que han determinado el nivel y variabilidad de la abstención electoral en las elecciones generales españolas. Extendiendo los modelos de carácter psicológico y sociológico que se han empleado (con éxito relativo) para explicar la abstención española, este estudio muestra que el nivel de participación en las elecciones generales depende en buena medida de factores estrictament…
European Monetary Union and the Spanish Left
How does the internationalization of national economies affect their governance? How does the creation of a single European market and a quasi-unified economic authority affect the ability of national governments to deliver growth and ensure fair economic results? Why and how does the Left, under varying institutional domestic conditions, embrace and adjust to a single monetary system? Spain’s experience of the eighties and nineties provides an e…
Democracy, Development, and the Public Sector
This article develops a model that describes the growth of the public sector as a joint result of the process of economic development and the political institutions in place. The model is tested using panel data for about sixty five developing and developed nations for the period 195090. Economic modernization leads to the growth of the public sector through two mechanisms: first, the state intervenes to provide certain collective goods such as r…
Trade, Democracy, and the Size of the Public Sector: The Political Underpinnings of Openness
Politics remains prominently absent in the literature showing that higher levels of trade integration lead to a larger public sector. As openness increases, the state, acting as a social planner, adopts a salient role to minimize the risks of economic integration and secure social peace. Given the highly redistributive nature of both trade and fiscal policies, we claim, however, that the interaction of the international economy and domestic polit…
Endogenous Democratization
The authors show that economic development increases the probability that a country will undergo a transition to democracy. These results contradict the finding of Przeworski and his associates, that development causes democracy to last but not to come into existence in the first place. By dealing adequately with problems of sample selection and model specification, the authors discover that economic growth does cause nondemocracies to democratiz…
Spain: Development, Democracy and Equity
Spain stands as one of the few countries in the world which have completed a successful transition from authoritarianism and relative underdevelopment to democracy and economic abundance in the last half century. This paper explores the nature and causes of the economic underdevelopment of Spain since the 19th century and the violent collapse of its brief democratic experiment in the early 1930s. The Franco regime ? particularly its heavily regul…
Democracy and Redistribution
When do countries democratize? What facilitates the survival of authoritarian regimes? What determines the occurrence of revolutions, often leading to left-wing dictatorships, such as the Soviet regime? Although a large literature has developed since Aristotle through contemporary political science to answer these questions, we still lack a convincing understanding of the process of political development. Employing analytical tools borrowed from …
Economic Roots of Civil Wars and Revolutions in the Contemporary World
To explain the distribution of civil wars, guerrilla warfare, and revolutionary outbreaks, the literature on modern political violence has shifted, broadly speaking, from a modernization perspective that emphasized the role of material conflict and of grievances to a more recent research program that stresses the geographical and organizational opportunities that insurgents may have to engage in violence. Drawing on those lines of inquiry equally…
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics offers a critical survey of the field of empirical political science through the collection of a set of articles written by forty-seven scholars in the discipline of comparative politics. Part I includes articles surveying the key research methodologies employed in comparative politics (the comparative method, the use of history, the practice and status of case-study research, and the contributions of f…
The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics Oxford Handbooks of Political Science
The Conditional Relationship between Inequality and Development
In recent years political scientists and economists have spent considerable efforts investigating the impact of income inequality both on political institutions and social conflict (Boix 2003, 2008; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Geddes 2007) and on growth and development (Atkinson and Bourguignon 2000). In this article I focus on the latter question: I discuss the extent to which (that is, the conditions under which) inequality may hinder economic …
Origins and Persistence of Economic Inequality
After reviewing the current literature on the causes of economic inequality, the article models the historical emergence of inequality as the result of a key technological change (i.e., the adoption of agriculture) that widened income differentials and led to the construction of state institutions, which shaped (depending on their particular nature, more or less authoritarian) the final distribution of economic assets within and across different …
Electoral Markets, Party Strategies, and Proportional Representation
Following Kreuzer's (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key "moments" in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the interests of different parties toward proportional represen…
Democracy, Development, and the International System
Resolving a controversy on the relationship of development to democratization, this article expands the time period under study with panel data running from the early nineteenth century (a time where hardly any country was democratic) to the end of the twentieth century, and shows a positive and significant effect of income on the likelihood of democratic transitions and democratic consolidations. The estimations hold after I control for country …
Overview of Comparative Politics
This article discusses several crucial questions that comparative political scientists address. These questions also form part of the basis of the current volume. The article first studies the theory and methods used in gathering data and evidence, and then focuses on the concepts of states, state formation, and political consent. Political regimes, political conflict, mass political mobilization, and political instability are other topics examin…
Political science (38 works) · Economics (32 works) · Politics (32 works) · Law (24 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Democracy (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (12 works) · Development economics (11 works)