Family Types and Political Development

Jerg Gutmann and Stefan Voigt

No 34, ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics

Abstract: Many years ago, Emmanuel Todd argued that differences in family organization - specifically the rules of inheritance, the number of generations living under one roof, and endogamous marriage - are reflected in the organization of the state. He also argued that different family types lead to different paths of economic development. Economists have long ignored these sweeping claims, but with increasing interest in the deep causes of economic development, family types have caught the attention of some economists. Here, we try to take Todd seriously and evaluate his predictions empirically. Relying on a parsimonious model with exogenous covariates, we find mixed results. On the one hand, countries in which authoritarian family types dominate have much higher levels of the rule of law and innovation than predicted by Todd. On the other, countries in which the communitarian family types dominate are characterized by racism, low levels of the rule of law, few checks on government, and late industrialization. Countries in which endogamy is frequently practiced display a high level of state fragility and have weak civil society organizations.

Keywords: Family types; family systems; family structures; ideology; state formation; constitutional structure; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 H11 J12 K36 N30 O17 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/216096/1/ile-wp-2020-34.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Testing Todd: family types and development (2022)
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:zbw:ilewps:34

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().