IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-04167501.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Institutional constraints on the executive, investment, and elections

Author

Listed:
  • Brandice Canes-Wrone

    (Stanford University)

  • Christian Ponce de Leon

    (ITESM - Tecnológico de Monterrey = Monterrey Institute of Technology)

  • Sebastian Thieme

    (TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

In recent years, a variety of countries worldwide have experienced an increase in executive power. Long-standing concerns about this concentration include reduced property rights protection. Particularly for developing democracies, scholars theorize that a lack of institutional constraints on the executive may impede long-term investment. Analyzing this question empirically has proven difficult, however, because economic activity can affect political institutions and behavior. This article, which analyzes four decades of data from 57 developing democracies, addresses the identification challenges by leveraging elections as a source of exogenous turnover and by accounting for the potential endogeneity of executive institutions. Consistent with the argument that institutional constraints reassure investors, the results suggest that as constraints on the executive increase, investment is less affected by prospective electoral turnover. Moreover, the results are stronger for presidential and semi-presidential systems with fixed elections, where the chief executive's term cannot be ended early by elections or the legislature, than for parliamentary systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Brandice Canes-Wrone & Christian Ponce de Leon & Sebastian Thieme, 2023. "Institutional constraints on the executive, investment, and elections," Post-Print hal-04167501, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04167501
    DOI: 10.1111/psq.12822
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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-04167501. 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.