Endogenous Constitutions: Politics and Politicians Matter, Economic Outcomes Don’t

Bernd Hayo and Stefan Voigt

No 201027, MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung)

Abstract: We study changes in the form of government as an example of endogenously determined constitutions. For a sample of 202 countries over the period 1950–2006, we find that most changes are relatively small and roughly equally likely to be either in the direction of more parliamentarian or more presidential systems. Based on a fixed effects ordered logit panel data model estimated over the period 1951–2000 for 146 countries, we find that such changes in the constitution can be explained by characteristics of the political system, internal and external political conflicts, and political leaders, whereas economic and socio-demographic variables do not matter.

Keywords: Constitutional change; form of government; endogenous constitutions; separation of powers; relevance of leaders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 K10 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Forthcoming in

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb02/research-groups ... ers/27-2010_hayo.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Endogenous constitutions: Politics and politicians matter, economic outcomes don’t (2013)
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:mar:magkse:201027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MAGKS Papers on Economics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bernd Hayo ().