Calendrier du 13 septembre 2018
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 13/09/2018 de 12:30 à 13:30
TEP Travail et économie publique (PSE)
Annual group meeting
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 13/09/2018 de 12:30 à 14:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
THOENIG M. (U of Lausanne )
Ethnic conflicts and Democracy
Why does democracy occur? Most existing explanations view democracy as an institutional arrangement that solves a class conflict between a rich elite and the rest of the population. We study the logic of democratic transition when ethnic tensions are more salient than the poor/rich divide. We provide a theoretical model where both military and political mobilizations rest on the unobserved strength of ethnic identity. By eliciting information, free and fair elections restore inter-ethnic bargaining efficiency and prevent conflict outbreak. Our setup generates new predictions on the nature of political regime, government tenure, inequality, ethnic politics and social unrest for ethnically divided countries - all consistent with country-level panel evidence on heterogeneity of inequality patterns and government duration across different types of autocratic/democratic regimes.