The Origins of Elite Persistence: Evidence from Political Purges in Post-world War Ii France

Abstract : This paper studies the mechanisms that allow political elites from a non-democratic regime to survive a democratic transition and argues that connections is one of them. We document this phenomenon using the transition from the Vichy regime back to democracy in post-World War II France. The politicians who had supported the Vichy regime were purged in a two-stage process whereby local courts, Comités départementaux de libération (CDLs) and a national court, the Jury d'Honneur, sequentially decided on the case of each defendant. First, we show that the Jury was more likely than the CDLs to clear parliamentarians who were Law graduates, a historically powerful group in French politics. The difference in clearance rates between Law graduates and other defendants was 10 percentage points higher in front of the Jury than in front of the CDLs. The Jury overruled the decision of the CDLs to purge Law graduates in 26.36% of the cases whereas it only did so in 15.97% of the cases for other defendants. This Law graduate advantage was consequential and created elite persistence, as it mainly appeared when defendants intended on continuing their political careers. Second, a systematic analysis of the still-classified 17,589 documents of the Jury contained in the dossiers of the defendants is consistent with the hypothesis that the connections of Law graduates to the Jury was a major driver of their advantage and of their ability to avoid the purge. We consider and rule out a series of alternative mechanisms.

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War, Trade, and the Roots of Representative Governance

Abstract : This paper evaluates the historical roots of representative forms of governance. We argue that the two most important representative institutions invented in medieval Europe—communes and parliaments—emerged in a sequenced bargain over war and trade. Communes emerged first, when merchants offered attractive enough sums in exchange for rights of self-government. In the process, communes became important new actors in tax collection (given the absence of tax-collecting bureaucracies). Soon after, monarchs sought to reduce their costs of negotiating the "extraordinary" taxes that financed their wars. Rather than negotiate individually with each of their newly important towns, they summoned urban representatives to their pre-existing noble councils, creating parliaments. Exploiting two new panel datasets, our empirical analyses show how war and trade combined to motivate the formation first of communes and then of parliaments.

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Fiscal Legibility and State Development: Evidence from Colonial Mexico

Abstract : We examine how fiscal legibility, the ability of a central government to observe local economic conditions for the purposes of taxation, shapes political centralization. When a ruler is unable to observe economic conditions, it can be preferable to grant autonomy to local intermediaries in charge of tax collection to encourage better performance. As a ruler's ability to observe local conditions improves, so does the ability to monitor and sanction underperforming intermediaries. This enables the ruler to tighten control over tax collection, retain more revenue, and establish a more direct state presence. This shift also encourages the ruler to invest in further enhancing fiscal legibility over the longer term. We present a dynamic principal-agent model to illustrate this argument and provide empirical support for the theory using subnational panel data on local political institutions in colonial Mexico. We focus on the effects of a technological innovation that drastically improved the Spanish Crown's ability to observe local economic production: the introduction of the patio process to refine silver. We show that the transition to direct rule differentially increased in mining districts following this technological innovation and that these areas saw greater investments in improving state informational capacity over the long term.

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