Adam Przeworski

• New York University

Lo que es “democrático” depende de los valores que se atribuyan a la democracia. La distinción que determina la respuesta es entre las concepciones minimalista y maximalista de la democracia.

What is "democratic" depends on the values one attaches to democracy. The distinction that determines the answer is between minimalist and maximalist conceptions of democracy. Defending democracy requires a positive, forward-looking program of reform.

¿Influyen las condiciones de la economía en las decisiones de voto de los individuos? El presente estudio se basa en datos individuales procedentes de 63 encuestas a lo largo de dieciséis años, abarcando 158.412 entrevistados. Analizando series temporales de la relación entre las valoraciones agregadas de la economía y las condiciones objetivas de...

Distingo los tipos de arreglos institucionales diseñados para ase- gurar la compatibilidad de las leyes con las constituciones. Luego repaso sus respectivos méritos y deméritos. Mi conclusión es que confiar exclusivamente en la revisión ex-ante no genera ninguno de los desastres conjurados por los defensores de la “democracia liberal” y tiene el mé...

A hidden facet of democratization in the world over the past two centuries has been the increased weight of people's voice in electing presidents. On the basis of new data on all presidential elections in the world since 1789, we show that they evolved from systems in which the final decision was made by someone other than voters, to systems in whi...

Ostensibly, “The Man of Iron” is a film about a successful strike, the culmination of ten years of hope and struggle, an act of solidarity among workers who have understood that the only guarantee of their material well-being and their freedom is the union, an autonomous power of their own. It is a film about a strike and, midway, director Andrzej...

The very idea that authoritarian regimes (“autocracies”) may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions, and many are driven by methodological fashions. They ignore the efforts of rulers to provide what people value. The psychology they assume is inadequate to pr...

A hidden facet of democratization in the world over the past two centuries has been the increased weight of people’s voice in electing presidents. On the basis of new data on all presidential elections in the world since 1789, we show that they evolved from systems in which the final decision was made by someone other than voters, to systems in whi...

The very idea that authoritarian regimes ("autocracies") may enjoy popular support is hard to fathom for democrats. Models of authoritarian regimes often entail tacit ideological assumptions and many are driven by methodological fashions. They fail to elucidate complex psychological mechanisms that shape people's postures toward these regimes. "Sup...

¿Debería leerse a Marx hoy? ¿Cuáles de sus teorías sobreviven al paso del tiempo y cuáles deberían abandonarse? Este artículo revisa cuatro de los temas de Marx: la búsqueda de la abundancia material, la compatibilidad entre capitalismo y democracia, el papel del Estado y la teoría de la dinámica del capitalismo.

The US 2020 presidential election constitutes an anomaly for the general paradigm of learning from history that organizes cross-national research in politics. Was it a unique event that can be ignored or must we consider that history is no longer a reliable guide?

Should one read Marx today? Which of his theories survive the test of time and which should be abandoned? This article reviews four of Marx’s themes: the quest for material abundance, the compatibility of capitalism and democracy, the role of the state, and the theory of the dynamics of capitalism.

Democracies reacted slower than autocracies to the specter of the pandemic, and the most solidly democratic among them were particularly slow to react. We examine at which stages of the spread of the Covid governments introduced four measures that to varying degree abrogate liberal rights: school closings, bans on public meetings, compulsory lockdo...

Representation is always a dynamic relation, a tatonnement, in which the represented adjust their preferences on the basis of beliefs induced by the representatives. All rulers—those selected in clean elections, those who hold such ceremonies without putting their power at stake, and those who do not even bother to hold them—claim to have reasons t...

Democracies reacted slower than autocracies to the specter of the pandemic, and the most solidly democratic among them were particularly slow to react. We examine at which stages of the spread of the Covid governments introduced four measures that to varying degree abrogate liberal rights: school closings, bans on public meetings, compulsory lockdo...

The dream of all politicians is to remain for ever in office. Most governmentsattempt to advance this goal by building popular support within the establishedinstitutional framework. Some, however, seek to protect their tenure in office byundermining institutions and disabling all opposition. The striking lesson of thesuccessful cases of backsliding...

Cambridge Core - American Studies - Crises of Democracy - by Adam Przeworski

Why are the fastest growing countries predominantly autocracies? One possible reason is that growth “tigers” are poor countries that begin growing when their distance to the most advanced economies is large, and poor countries tend to be autocracies. All that is needed to reproduce the observed historical patterns is income convergence and a positi...

Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily through preventive repression routinely exercised by specialized security agencies, with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizing and threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyze the moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agent relationship between rul...

Authoritarian leaders maintain their grip on power primarily through preventive repression, routinely exercised by specialized security agencies with the aim of preventing any opponents from organizing and threatening their power. We develop a formal model to analyze the moral hazard problems inherent in the principal-agent relationship between rul...

Translation to Portuguese of "What makes democracies endure", by Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José Antônio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi.

Most of my work focused on the functioning and the limits of democracy. I place the evolution of our understanding of this bewildering institution in the context of historical events and consider the challenges posed by its current critics. I also reflect on methods, arguing that game theory is the natural language of the social sciences. These rum...

Leading Western and Russian political scientists contributed to this collective study, which covers issues related to the Russian record of democratic rule and operation of the current political regime in the country, as well as comparative analysis of various concepts of democracy and institutional analysis of various organisations and mechanisms...

Leading Western and Russian political scientists contributed to this collective study, which covers issues related to the Russian record of democratic rule and operation of the current political regime in the country, as well as comparative analysis of various concepts of democracy and institutional analysis of various organisations and mechanisms...

In the spirit of Jeremy Bentham's Political Tactics, this volume offers the first comprehensive discussion of the effects of secrecy and publicity on debates and votes in committees and assemblies. The contributors - sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal scholars - consider the micro-technology of voting (the devil is in the detail)...

What can we learn about democracy from the experience of post-Soviet Russia? What can we learn about the prospects for democracy in Russia from the experience of 'really existing democracies'? Must some 'pre-requisites', cultural or material, be fulfilled for democracy to become possible? This book examines the current state of Russia and the prosp...

What can we learn about democracy from the experience of post-Soviet Russia? What can we learn about the prospects for democracy in Russia from the experience of 'really existing democracies'? Must some 'pre-requisites', cultural or material, be fulfilled for democracy to become possible? This book examines the current state of Russia and the prosp...

What can we learn about democracy from the experience of post-Soviet Russia? What can we learn about the prospects for democracy in Russia from the experience of 'really existing democracies'? Must some 'pre-requisites', cultural or material, be fulfilled for democracy to become possible? This book examines the current state of Russia and the prosp...

Quantitative cross-national comparisons usually are based on smaller N's. This implies that theory needs to be stronger and that counterfactuals need to be made explicit. Bayesian estimation is, in this situation, an attractive possibility. Because dependent variables are often categorical or limited, it is often preferable to use nonlinear models,...

Changing governments through elections is a rare and a recent practice. Yielding office the first time is foreboding because it entails the risk that the gesture would not be reciprocated, but the habit develops rapidly once the first step is taken. This article provides evidence for these assertions by examining about 3,000 elections in the world...

Este artigo aborda estritamente um único enigma: por que os países que tentaram instaurar uma democracia mais cedo a vivenciaram com menor frequência? As dinâmicas de regime são impulsionadas por dois mecanismos: (1) as democracias se tornam mais duráveis à medida que aumenta a renda per capita; e (2) experiências anteriores com a democracia desest...

“Toute Constitution est un régicide.” l’abbé Rauzan, quoted in de Wasquerel and Yvert 2002: 61 Introduction The topic of this chapter is the origins of government responsibility to parliaments, the shift of the power to appoint governments from the monarch to elected assemblies. Whereas one can adduce several reasons to study the history of parliam...

The Polish Constitution of 1952 appears in all substantive aspects to be a constitution of democracy. Most importantly, it does not contain the clause giving the communist party “the leading role in the state,” a clause standard in communist constitutions, beginning with the Soviet one of 1936. This fact is puzzling because Communist Party had a de...

Conflicts, liberty and peace do not coexist easily. Through most of history, civil peace was maintained by the threat of force. Contemporary ideologues of authoritarian regimes maintain that political conflicts inevitably result in violence, and the founders of modern representative institutions in the West have shared this view. Yet we now know th...

Representative government in the West was born under an ideology that postulated a basic harmony of interests in society. The political decision process was thus expected to be largely consensual. This ideology obfuscated important conflicts of values and interests, and it became untenable with the rise of mass, class-based and religious parties. B...

We examine the impact of political and criminal accountabil- ity on economic growth. Governments seek to maximize their own consumption by extracting rents that are costly to growth. When citizens are able to depose politicians through elections, governments are tightly controlled. The rents politicians are able to extract increase in the length of...

The political institutions under which we live today evolved from a revolutionary idea that shook the world in the second part of the eighteenth century: that a people should govern itself. Yet if we judge contemporary democracies by the ideals of self-government, equality and liberty, we find that democracy is not what it was dreamt to be. This bo...

This article provides an overview of the issues needed in making causal inferences, when the generated data come from processes that are not controlled by the researcher. This overview serves as an introduction to the issues that have been discussed in detail by other researchers. This article emphasizes that the possible causes of these issues may...

The eighteenth-century ideal of self-government of the people was based on an assumption that renders it incoherent and unrealistic, namely, that interests and values are sufficiently harmonious that each individual needs to obey only himself while living under laws chosen by all. This conception collapses in the presence of heterogeneous preferenc...

Why was franchise extended to the lower classses and to women? Was it conquered by the excluded groups, threatening that unless they were admitted as citizens they would reach for power by other, revolutionary, means? Or was it voluntarily granted by the incumbent elites? This question is examined statistically, using a new dataset covering the ent...

The paper is narrowly addressed to a single puzzle: How did it happen that countries that attempted to install democracy earlier enjoyed it less frequently? Regime dynamics are driven by two mechanisms: (1) Democracies become more durable as per capita income increases, and (2) Past experiences with democracy destabilize both democracies and autocr...

Dass Demokratie nicht nur politische, sondern auch ökonomische Gleichheit fördern soll, ist eine unwiderstehliche intuitive Überzeugung. Demokratien haben es jedoch mit ökonomischen Systemen zu tun, in denen Märkte die Verteilung der meisten Ressourcen regeln, und Märkte (re-)generieren ständig Ungleichheit. Deshalb sind wir immer wieder überrascht...

Participation in electoral politics is not a fully voluntary act. Suffrage rules regulate who can participate, whereas institutional arrangements affect incentives to vote by shaping the consequences of the voting act. The secular increase of electoral participation in the world during the past two centuries was largely due to extensions of suffrag...

Introduction This chapter begins where others have ended, namely, with the finding that poor people differ little in their attitudes toward democracy, their political values, and in the actual rates of electoral participation from those who are better off. Even if they may be more likely to see democracy in instrumental terms, the poor value democr...

Michael Wallerstein's tragic death at the age of fifty-four deprived the world of one of its leading political economists. For twenty-five years Wallerstein had been in the forefront of rigorous analysis of the political economy of contemporary industrial societies. His research on relations between labor and capital, on labor organization, and on...

Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume coll...

Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume coll...

Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume coll...

Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume coll...

The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy surveys the field of political economy. Over its long lifetime, political economy has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical proce...

Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume coll...

The question studied here is whether political regimes, dichotomized as democracies and autocracies, affect the rate of growth of employment. But broader issues are at stake.

Why do some autocrats survive for decades, and others fall soon after taking power? The authors argue that when authoritarian rulers need to solicit the cooperation of outsiders or deter the threat of rebellion, they rely on political institutions. Partisan legislatures incorporate potential opposition forces, giving them a stake in the ruler's sur...

The historical development of western civilization has produced several patterns of political opposition deeply rooted and relatively well established in the political systems. This opposition is usually identified with the control of the governed over the government : it is maintained that opposition is at the same time a sufficient and a necessar...

Democratic citizens are not equal but only anonymous, indistinguishable by any traits they may possess. Democracy only places a veil over distinctions that exist in society. Even the one sense in which equality can be said to characterise democracy-equality before the law-is derivative from anonymity: The law has to treat all citizens equally becau...

Michael Wallerstein, the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Political Science at Yale University, died on January 7, 2006, at his home in New Haven. He was just short of his 55th birthday. The cause was glioblastoma multiforme, a brain cancer.

We ask what redistributions of income and assets are feasible in a democracy, given the initial assets and their distribution. The question is motivated by the possibility that if redistribution is insufficient for the poor or excessive for the rich, they may turn against democracy. In turn, if no redistribution simultaneously satisfies the poor an...

Dictatorships are not all the same: some are purely autocratic but many exhibit a full panoply of seemingly democratic institutions. To explain these differences, we develop a model in which dictators may need cooperation to generate rents and may face a threat of rebellion. Dictators have two instruments: they can make policy concessions or share...

O artigo indaga o quanto o mecanismo eleitoral pode, de fato, tornar mais representativas as instituições da democracia. Os autores diagnosticam sérias limitações no voto como mecanismo capaz de alavancar algum controle do representado sobre o representante.The issue of this article is how much the electoral mechanism can effectively make the insti...

The issue of this article is how much the electoral mechanism can effectively make the institutions of democracy more representative. The authors single out some critical limitations for the constituents to enhance controlling mechanisms over their representatives.

Seguindo Douglas North, os autores neoinstitucionalistas afirmam que as instituições são as causas "primordiais" do desenvolvimento econômico, "mais profundas" do que os fatores identificados pelo marxismo como "forças de produção". Embora essas duas perspectivas cheguem a conclusões diferentes, suas narrativas históricas pouco diferem. Este artigo...

Observation shows that while democracy is fragile in poor countries, it is impregnable in developed ones. To explain this pattern, I develop a model in which political parties propose redistributions of incomes, observe the result of an election, and decide whether to comply with the outcome or to launch a struggle for dictatorship. Democracy preva...

Many new democracies and perhaps even some older democracies do not appear to be functioning as democracies should. Politicians ignore public opinion, go back on their campaign promises, and are not held accountable at elections. The five books under review chart a new research program that addresses these issues. They attempt to measure the presen...

Capitalism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. This relation is historically contingent. It is true that democracy tends to prevail in the most developed capitalist countries. But this is not because capitalist development breeds democracy. The reason is that once democracy is present in wealthy societies, everyone has too...

Are government coalitions less frequent under presidentialism than under parliamentarism? Do legislative deadlocks occur when presidents do not form majoritarian governments? Are presidential democracies more brittle when they are ruled by minorities? We answer these questions observing almost all democracies that existed between 1946 and 1999. It...

The main methodological problem in assessing the impact of political institutions on any kind of performance stems from the possibility that institutions may be endogenous. As a result, institutions cannot be matched for the conditions under which they function. Inferences from such non-experimental observations are subject to several biases and, i...

Following Douglas North, neo-institutionalists claim that institutions are the “primary” cause of economic development, “deeper” than the supply of factors and methods for their use, which Marxists would call “forces of production”. Yet while the conclusion is different, the historical narratives differ little across these perspectives. How, then,...

Abstract Autocratic regimes may be replaced by either new autocratic regimes or democratic regimes, but previous research has only looked at changes ,between ,democratic and non-democratic regimes where non-democracy ,is a residual category that lumps together both stable autocratic regimes and transitions between autocratic regimes. We develop hyp...

I review the controversy over the roles of geography and in- stitutions in economic development. Using the new data set of Maddison (2003) shows that the only major reversal of fortunes consisted of four British oshoots passing the income levels of the rest of the world: a …nding which, in my view, casts doubts on the importance of institutions. I...

"That institutions affect the performance of economies is hardly controversial. That the differential performance of economies over time is fundamentally influenced by the way institutions evolve is also not controversial".