Parliamentary experience and contemporary democracy in Africa: A Northian view

Sophie Harnay () and Joseph Keneck Massil ()
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Sophie Harnay: EconomiX - EconomiX - UPN - Université Paris Nanterre - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Joseph Keneck Massil: Cemotev - Centre d'études sur la mondialisation, les conflits, les territoires et les vulnérabilités - UVSQ - Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

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Abstract: In a series of pioneering works, Douglass North argues that the institutional innovations taking place in seventeenth-century England as a consequence of a modification of the balance of power between the Parliament and the Crown provided the conditions not only for economic growth, but also for the development of democratic institutions later on. Our article extends his analysis to the study of parliaments in African countries before and after independence. We find that countries in which parliaments were established prior to independence are more likely to have efficient democratic institutions today. We define a variable of interest, ‘parliamentary experience at independence', and estimate its effect on a democracy index. Several sensitivity and robustness tests confirm our results that parliamentary experience at the time of independence is a determinant of democracy in African countries today. This corroborates North's idea that history and institutions do matter.

Keywords: Parliaments; democratic experience; Douglass North; democratic performance; colonial institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Published in Economic History of Developing Regions, 2021, 36, pp.82-115

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03039032

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