P16

Some of the most contested questions in political science and political economy revolve around the conditions under which democratization is likely to happen and when democracy becomes a stable institutional choice. This paper revisits the particular claim in the democratization literature that the...

Popular protest in South Africa has increased sharply in recent years to the extent that it now seems to have pervaded the floor of parliament. In post-apartheid South Africa, economic slowdown is found to be a precursor of a rise in public protest. Young people are more ready than other age groups...

The current structure of South Africa’s economy is partly a product of the terms of the country’s political dispensation. The availability of capital mobility as an exit option is a key aspect of South Africa’s negotiated democracy. As long as inequality remains high, capital continues to gravitate...

This paper seeks to offer an economic explanation for the emergence of democracy in societies with high income inequality and narrow middle-class such as Apartheid South Africa. The presence of a credible threat of capital flight is shown to render democracy less unpleasant to the elites by making...

This paper sets out to establish an empirical link between education and property rights. The analysis is based on a new index of property rights derived from a set of commonly used indicators. As expected, education has a generally positive impact on property rights. But the relationship is not...

We investigate in this paper whether the exogenous version of the modernisation hypothesis holds in South America, or whether democracy needs development for its own consolidation. We use a sample of all nine countries that re-democratised in the last thirty years or so and the data sets cover two...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual...