IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03979280.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The wise, the politician, and the strongman: Types of national leaders and quality of governance

Author

Listed:
  • Julieta Peveri

    (AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AMU - Aix Marseille Université - ECM - École Centrale de Marseille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

This paper assesses how national leaders' quality of governance varies with their career and education. Using a sample of 1,000 rulers between 1931 and 2010, I identify three types of leaders: military leaders, academics, and politicians. Military leaders are associated with an overall negative performance, while politicians who have held important offices before taking power tend to perform well. Academics have on average non-significant effects. These results are partially driven by differences in policy decisions and in leadership styles. Military leaders spend less in health and education, are more likely to establish a personalistic regime, to disrespect the constitution, and to move towards a nonelectoral regime, while the reverse holds for politicians. Additionally, this paper highlights the weakness of using educational attainment as a proxy for politicians' quality, and of growth as a measure of national leaders' performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Julieta Peveri, 2022. "The wise, the politician, and the strongman: Types of national leaders and quality of governance," Post-Print hal-03979280, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03979280
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2022.06.001
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03979280
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-03979280/document
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jce.2022.06.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sørensen, Rune J., 2023. "Educated politicians and government efficiency: Evidence from Norwegian local government," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 210(C), pages 163-179.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03979280. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.