Ethnic winning coalitions and the political economy of
aid
Nils-Christian Bormann1, Vera Z. Eichenauer2, Simon Hug3
Department of Politics, Exeter University
Alfred-Weber-Institut for Economics, Heidelberg University
Département de science
politique et
relations internationales, Université de Genève
Paper prepared for presentation at the 10th Annual Conference on
The Political Economy of International Organizations
(Bern, January 12-14, 2016)
First version: September 2016, this
very preliminary
version: Oct 28, 2016
Abstract
Selectorate theory provides an elegant and encompassing theoretical
framework that makes predictions for several important puzzles in
research on democracies and autocracies. Yet several critics lament
shortcomings in the measurement of its key concepts: the size of
the selectorate S and the winning coalition W. We suggest an alternative
that exploits information on the power status and population shares
of ethnic groups around the world. Specifically, we identify the size of
the selectorate as the sum of those groups that do not suffer from
political discrimination, and the size of the winning coalition as the
sum of groups, which enjoy meaningful representation in a state's executive.
Our proposal improves on existing work by providing the first continuous
operationalization of W and S, by avoiding overlap with important
measures of democracy, and by not yielding observations, in which the size of W
exceeds the size of S. We illustrate the usefulness by retesting
and extending the claim that regimes with smaller winning coalitions
receive higher levels of aid.
Footnotes:
1 Department of Politics,
Amory Building,
Rennes Drive,
Exeter,
Devon,
EX4 4RJ,
United Kingdom; phone ++44 1392 723283; email:
N.Bormann@exeter.ac.uk
2 Alfred-Weber-Institut for Economics,
Heidelberg University, Bergheimerstrasse 58, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany Tel.: +49 - 6221 - 54 38 54;
E-Mail: vera.eichenauer@awi.uni-heidelberg.de
3 Département de science politique et
relations internationales, Faculté des sciences de la société; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont
d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 89 47; email:
simon.hug@unige.ch
File translated from
TEX
by
TTH,
version 4.08.