The Cultural Roots of Institutions

Mariko Klasing ()

University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2008 from Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen

Abstract: Do political institutions have cultural roots? Using a novel data set of cultural values we show that culture, defined as a society's collective beliefs and values, is an important determinant of institutions. We argue that the traditional proxies for culture used in the existing literature suffer from conceptual problems and find that they do not survive several robustness checks. Our results suggest, that individualist societies and societies with preference for a more equal distribution of power set up institutions that better protect individual property rights, place more constraints on governments and have more effective governments. We find that our measures of culture are robust to the inclusion of other control variables and across different samples and that they always dominate the effects of the traditional proxies.

Keywords: Institutions; political institutions; culture; cultural values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 F55 O17 P00 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cul, nep-hpe, nep-pke, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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