 Steam democracy up! Industrialization-led opposition in Napoleonic plebiscitesULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Abstract: Which dimension of economic development spurred support to democracy? This study focuses on industrialization as the dimension triggering the process of political "modernization". It uses a new dataset on Napoleonic plebiscites under the second French Empire (1852-1870). The results in those plebiscites provide a detailed cross-départements (French main administrative units) measure of opposition to autocracy. This study uses the variations in the thriving French modernization to disentangle the effect of industrialization on the vote from the one of other dimensions of economic development. Doubling industrial employment in the Puy-de-Dôme département (median of the distribution) would have decreased support to autocracy by 2.5-5.0 percentage points. An IV strategy using distance to the first city having adopted steam engines, access to coal and waterpower as instruments suggests causality. The baseline results are robust to controlling for other explanations of the vote and to using alternative specifications and estimation methods. Date: 2018-05 Published in: European review of economic history (2018) v.22 n° 2,p.135-160 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/276937 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC. |
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