Thursday, 17 March 2011
Inequality, Dictatorships, and Democracies
Also in my public blog, a post I wrote some time ago about the differences between dictatorships and democracies in terms of inequality. I am planning to talk about this later in the term, but one person asked about this, so I am posting it here. Before reading the post, consider: which do you think would be more unequal, democracies or dictatorships? After reading it, consider: were your expectations disappointed?
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thank you for the long post in your public blog, but i never thought that you could assess democracies and dictatorships through the wealth of the nation as well as the idea that dictatorships can be much more equal than democracies.
ReplyDeletecheers sir.
mean mug, it's true that that's not the only thing that matters, but it seems useful. If democracies produce (on average) wealthier, more equal societies, that may be a good reason to prefer democracies to dictatorships. (Though demonstrating causality - that democracy causes wealth or equality- is complicated, we have some theoretical reasons to think this is true). Also note that in the post I indicate that only some dictatorships - communist dictatorships - are more equal; most dictatorships are more unequal than most democracies, and some democracies can also be very equal - though most democracies have middling inequality, most dictatorships have high inequality, and some democracies and dictatorships have low inequality.
ReplyDeleteHow would you assess democracies and dictatorships? What would you focus on?
Xavier, has there been any work looking at the correlation of inequality and the levels of repression and loyalty outlined in the four types of dictatorship identified by Wintrobe: totalitarians, tyrants, tinpots and timocrats? For example, it seems to me that there would be significantly lower levels of inequality in a timocrat regime compared to the other three.
ReplyDeleteFollowing from that, do you also think there would be obvious differing trends in inequality in dictatorships that have winning coalitions and selectorates of varying sizes, insofar as it might affect the level of corruption in the regime?
Paul, I don't know. I don't think there is any systematic classification of regimes using Wintrobe's typology (there was one in "Public Choice" but I don't remember how it worked, or how extensive it was. I think you could look it up in our course bibliography). Want to develop a democracy/dictatorship classification using Wintrobe's concepts? Or are you and your group too committed to the Levitsky and Way one?
ReplyDeleteThere must be only very few timocratic regimes in the world, by the way - Singapore perhaps the only one. And Singapore is not especially equal - there are actually fairly high levels of inequality there.
There is probably a correlation between inequality and winning coalition size, but I would not necessarily be able to say how the correlation would go offhand.
Here' the article I was thinkin gof: http://www.citeulike.org/group/13886/article/8589234
ReplyDeleteIt's a possibility, although I think it would be a lot of work to turn away from the Levitsky & Way classification at this point. I also think Wintrobe's concepts might be a little too narrow for democracy vs. dictatorship, and better suited as a secondary classification system for dictatorships alone (though I'm happy to be proven wrong)?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to that article - i will have a read through when I get a chance.