The Transition to Democracy: Collective Action and Intra-elite Confict

Sayantan Ghosal and Eugenio Proto

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies how intra-elite confict results in transition to democracy, characterized as both franchise extension to, and lowering the individual cost of collective political action for, an initially disorganized non-elite. Two risk averse elites compete for the appropriation of a unit of social surplus with initial uncertainty about their future relative bargaining power. Both elements of a democracy are necessary to ensure that the two elites credibly commit to a mutually fairer share of the surplus and we derive sufficient conditions for democracy to emerge in equilibrium. Our formal analysis accounts for stylized facts that emerge from an analysis of Indian and West European democracies.

Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-soc
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Working Paper: The Transition to Democracy: Collective Action and Intra-elite Conflict (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:807

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