APA
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Dower, P. C., Finkel, E., Gehlbach, S., & Nafziger, S. (2020). Democratization as a continuous choice: A comment on Acemoglu and Robinson’s correction to “Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?” Journal of Politics, 82(2), 776–780. https://doi.org/10.1086/707060
Chicago/Turabian
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Dower, Paul Castañeda, Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, and Steven Nafziger. “Democratization as a Continuous Choice: A Comment on Acemoglu and Robinson’s Correction to ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?’” Journal of Politics 82, no. 2 (2020): 776–780.
MLA
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Dower, Paul Castañeda, et al. “Democratization as a Continuous Choice: A Comment on Acemoglu and Robinson’s Correction to ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?’” Journal of Politics, vol. 82, no. 2, 2020, pp. 776–80, doi:10.1086/707060.
BibTeX Click to copy
@article{dower2020a,
title = {Democratization as a continuous choice: A comment on Acemoglu and Robinson’s correction to “Why Did the West Extend the Franchise?”},
year = {2020},
issue = {2},
journal = {Journal of Politics},
pages = {776-780},
volume = {82},
doi = {10.1086/707060},
author = {Dower, Paul Castañeda and Finkel, Evgeny and Gehlbach, Scott and Nafziger, Steven}
}
Acemoglu and Robinson recently provided a correction to Proposition 1 in "Why Did the West Extend the Franchise" (Acemoglu and Robinson 2000), showing that for intermediate values of q (the probability of social unrest in the future) the unique Markov perfect equilibrium is in mixed strategies. We discuss this correction in the context of a recent generalization of the Acemoglu-Robinson model that allows for a continuous institutional choice by the elite. In that environment, no correction is necessary: there is a unique threshold q* such that the elite liberalizes if q < q* and does not liberalize otherwise. Moreover, the main empirical prediction of Acemoglu and Robinson (2000) generalizes: not only does the elite not liberalize when the excluded group poses a frequent threat of unrest, but conditional on some representation having been granted, the level of representation is decreasing in the probability of unrest.