Essays in Political Economics

The thesis is intended to shed light on some crucial open questions in the political economy literature. The structure of the work is as follows: Section 1 reviews the literature; Section 2 compares constitutional systems over a set of economic outcomes; Section 3 is a research connecting revolution to voting behaviours. In detail, the aim of the literature review is twofold: it is aimed to provide the theoretical background for the empirical part of the thesis, and it goes over empirical works in the political economy literature so to highlight the novelty of the thesis. In Section 2, the difference in performance between constitutional systems is investigated. The effect of constitutional structures (such as the effect of a presidential vs a parliamentary system) over policy outcomes has been widely studied in the economic literature. This paper accounts for the heterogeneity in parliamentary systems by investigating whether stable and unstable parliamentary systems behave differently in terms of the policy they implement. This distinction of constitutional systems generates results that are more robust compared to the previous literature. More precisely, we find that parliamentary and presidential systems do not systematically differ but it depends on structural characteristics of the former constitutional design. Moreover, we show that this result is robust to changes in the set of countries and to changes in the definition of stability. Finally, we discuss how these results are consistent with the presence of a selection effect in parliamentary systems. Indeed, Section 3 analyses the autocracy-democracy transition focusing on the peculiar case of Tunisia and Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring waves. In particular, the analysis is aimed at connecting revolution to election. In literature, revolutions have been mainly described as collective action problems where people coordinate in order to overthrow a tyrannical political regime. But, participating or not into revolutionary waves depends on a cost-benefit calculation. It follows that the expected gross individual benefits from participating would hardly overcome net benefits, so making people reluctant to participate into revolutionary riots. Indeed, a revolution may be successful if a critical mass of well-organized people mobilize, while outcomes is enjoyed by all those symphatizing with the revolution goals, irrespective of participation. The intrinsic aims of this first-mover group may have a great impact on the post-revolution path, also through the election behaviours of people who have directly take part into revolutionary riots. After proposing the theoretical intuitions, we make use of the generalized structural equation approach accounting for the path-dependency between response variables so to empirically investigate the relationship between revolution, election and people preferences in the Arab Spring context.