Inherited Institutions: Cooperation in the Light of Democratic Legitimacy

Pascal Langenbach and Franziska Tausch ()

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2019, vol. 35, issue 2, 364-393

Abstract: We experimentally investigate whether the procedural history of a sanctioning institution affects cooperation in a social dilemma. Subjects inherit the institutional setting from a previous generation of subjects who either decided on the implementation of the institution democratically by majority vote or were exogenously assigned a setting. In order to isolate the impact of the voting procedure, no information about the cooperation history is provided. In line with existing empirical evidence, we observe that in the starting generation cooperation is higher (lower) with a democratically chosen (rejected) institution, as compared to the corresponding, randomly imposed setting. In the second generation, we find no positive effect of the democratic procedural history on cooperation when the institution is implemented. Yet, the vote-based rejection of the institution leads to (marginally) less cooperation in the second generation.

JEL-codes: C92 D02 D71 D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewz004 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Inherited Institutions: Cooperation in the Light of Democratic Legitimacy (2017)
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:oup:jleorg:v:35:y:2019:i:2:p:364-393.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization is currently edited by Andrea Prat

More articles in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization from Oxford University Press Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().