Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?

Ragnar Torvik, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Abstract: Voters often dismantle constitutional checks and balances on the executive. If such checks and balances limit presidential abuses of power and rents, why do voters support their removal? We argue that by reducing politician rents, checks and balances also make it cheaper to bribe or ináuence politicians through non-electoral means. In weakly-institutionalized polities where such non-electoral ináuences, particularly by the better organized elite, are a major concern, voters may prefer a political system without checks and balances as a way of insulating politicians from these ináuences. When they do so, they are e§ectively accepting a certain amount of politician (presidential) rents in return for redistribution. We show that checks and balances are less likely to emerge when (equilibrium) politician rents are low; when the elite are better organized and are more likely to be able to ináuence or bribe politicians; and when inequality and potential taxes are high (which makes redistribution more valuable to the majority). We show that the main intuition, that checks and balances, by making politicians ìcheaper to bribe,î are potentially costly to the majority, is valid under di§erent ways of modeling the form of checks and balances.

Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2011-09-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? (2013)
Working Paper: Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? (2013)
Working Paper: Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? (2013)
Working Paper: Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? (2011)
Working Paper: Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? (2011)
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