Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy - Hardcover

Acemoglu, Daron; Robinson, James A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521855268 ISBN 13: 9780521855266

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

What forces lead to democracy's creation? Why does it sometimes consolidate only to collapse at other times? Written by two of the foremost authorities on this subject in the world, this volume develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. It revolutionizes scholarship on the factors underlying government and popular movements toward democracy or dictatorship. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Their book, the subject of a four-day seminar at Harvard's Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences, was also the basis for the Walras-Bowley lecture at the joint meetings of the European Economic Association and Econometric Society in 2003 and is the winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association as the best economist working in the United States under age 40. He is the author of the forthcoming text Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. James A. Robinson is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is a Harvard Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Program on Institutions, Organizations, and Growth. He is coeditor with Jared Diamond of the forthcoming book Natural Experiments in History.

About this title

Book Description:

This book is the first to use modern social science methodology systematically to explain why some countries are democracies while others are not. What forces leade democracy to be created? Why does democracy sometimes persist and conoslidate while other times it collapses? The treatment shows that whether or not a society becomes democratic depends on six factors. These are the strength of civil society, the nature of political and economic crises, the level of inequality, the detailed structure of political institution, economic institutions, the structure of the economy and the form and extent of globalization.

About the Author:

Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Program on Institutions, Organizations, and Growth. He received the 2005 John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association to the best economist working in the United States under age 40. He is the author of the textbook Introduction to Modern Economic Growth and coeditor of Econometrica and NBER Macroannual.

James A. Robinson is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and is a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Program on Institutions, Organizations, and Growth. He is coeditor with Jared Diamond of Natural Experiments in History (2009).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0521855268
• ISBN 13: 9780521855266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 434