Hobbesian Wars and Democracy

主讲人：  谢阳，UC Riverside经济系助理教授

主持人：（国发院）李力行，席天扬，徐化愚，于航，王轩

              （经院）刘冲

时间：2022年3月9日14:00-15:30

地点：承泽园245教室

摘要：

We investigate the relationship between decision rules and civil conflict in a dynamic game of political contest and persecution in a king's council. In each period, each council member first decides whether to contest the kingship and thus start a civil conflict; the winner emerges as the king and then chooses how many council members are to be persecuted and expropriated, subject to the council's approval under the given decision rule. We focus on weakly institutionalized environments by considering (pure-strategy) Markov perfect equilibria. We show that in equilibrium, only unanimity rule can confer civil peace, whereas any other decision rule can lead to a perpetual Hobbesian war, in which every council member contests the kingship in each period. After allowing the decision rule to be chosen in a constitutional convention at the end of each period, we show that who -- the king or an ordinary council member -- sets the constitutional agenda is critical to whether the decision rule will evolve into dictatorship or unanimity rule. In an extension of the model, we show that non-unanimity rule, such as majoritarian rule, can confer civil peace, only if decisions to persecute are overseen by a judiciary that is sufficiently insulated from the executive council and if social cohesion among the judges and council members is sufficiently high. We discuss the implications of our results for a wide range of political-economic issues with historical and contemporary examples.

主讲人简介：

Yang Xie is an assistant professor at Department of Economics in University of California, Riverside. He obtained PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics in University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Professor Xie’s research interests focus on political economics, environmental and resource economics. He has published several papers in leading journals such like Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, and Journal of Comparative Economics.