Democracy, Capitalism, and Equality: The Importance of Impersonal Rules

Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis

No 32930, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We usually consider it progress when a country begins to shift from an autocratic to a democratic form of government. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating political instability. It also increases the incentives for those in power to manipulate the economy for political ends and thus often negatively affects economic growth. We argue that the key to getting beyond these pernicious effects—to reconciling democracy and capitalism—is to move to a governance structure based on impersonal rules that apply in the same way to everyone (or at least to broad categories of everyone). We lay out the theoretical basis for this argument and illustrate it with evidence about how the transformation worked (or not) in the case of the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany.

JEL-codes: H10 K10 N41 N43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-pol
Note: DAE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32930.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:32930

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32930
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().