Civil Liberties and Social Structure

Selman Erol and Camilo Garcia-Jimeno
Additional contact information
Camilo Garcia-Jimeno: https://www.chicagofed.org/people/g/garcia-jimeno-camilo

No WP 2024-05, Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Abstract: Governments use coercion to aggregate distributed information relevant to governmental objectives—from the prosecution of regime-stability threats to terrorism or epidemics. A cohesive social structure facilitates this task, as reliable information will often come from friends and acquaintances. A cohesive citizenry can more easily exercise collective action to resist such intrusions, however. We present an equilibrium theory where this tension mediates the joint determination of social structure and civil liberties. We show that segregation and unequal treatment sustain each other as coordination failures: citizens choose to segregate along the lines of an arbitrary trait only when the government exercises unequal treatment as a function of the trait, and the government engages in unequal treatment only when citizens choose to segregate based on the trait. We characterize when unequal treatment against a minority or a majority can be sustained, and how equilibrium social cohesiveness and civil liberties respond to the arrival of widespread surveillance technologies, shocks to collective perceptions about the likelihood of threats or the importance of privacy, or to community norms such as codes of silence.

Keywords: civil liberties; Segregation; Information Aggregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D73 D85 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60
Date: 2024-02-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.21033/wp-2024-05 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedhwp:97780

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lauren Wiese ().