Hobbesian Wars and Separation of Powers

Weijia Li, Gérard Roland and Yang Xie

No 30945, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper formalizes the principle that persecution power of government may generate violent contests over it. We show that this principle yields a large set of theoretical insights on different separation-of-powers institutions that can help to preempt such contests under different socio-economic conditions. When socio-economic cohesion is low, the risk of contests can be eliminated only by individual veto against persecution. Moreover, such unanimity rule is resilient to autocratic shocks only when the chief executive does not control the legislative agenda, i.e., the executive and legislative branches are separate. When socio-economic cohesion is high, the risk of violent contests can be eliminated without individual veto, but only by a persecution-reviewing judiciary whose members cannot join the executive branch in the future, i.e., when the executive and judicial branches are separate. Our results shed light on the evolution of separation of powers in European history.

JEL-codes: N40 P0 P14 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-02
Note: POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30945.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Hobbesian Wars and Separation of Powers (2023)
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:30945

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30945

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 ().