Fostering support for non-democratic rule?
When the Cold War ended, many non-democratic regimes across the globe embarked on a course of controlled political liberalization, hoping to stabilize their autocratic rule by mitigating popular demands for democratization and increasing regime legitimacy. But does this strategy actually work? This article uses multi-level analyses to examine how the degree of political liberalization affects regime support in non-democratic political systems and to ascertain which mechanisms underlie this effect. Drawing on aggregate measures of political liberalization and comparative survey data from four regional survey projects and 31 non-democracies, the study’s results indicate that the degree of liberalization has no decisively positive effect on regime support, suggesting controlled political liberalization might not be an effective legitimizing strategy after all.
A standard Ak-model of endogenous growth has been extended to allow for an intertemporal conflict between capitalists and workers. For the dynamic game thus obtained, an equilibrium solution in feedback Nash (Markovian) strategies have been computed. However, many equilibria in trigger strategies can dominate the former. There are dominating strategies that depend on the country-specific bargaining power of the workers versus capitalists; they are both Pareto optimal and subgame perfect. This provides an explanation why countries, which are completely identical in preferences, technology and factor endowments, can experience different long-term growth rates.