According to the selectorate theory put forth by Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, Siverson, and Smith, what are the two attributes of a polity that create incentives for leaders to produce economic growth and other desirable policy outcomes?Explain the mechanism by which these institutional features create such incentives and summarize the empirical evidence presented in class that is consistent with this theory. What, if anything does this theory say about the relationship between policy performance and democracy?What does it say about the relationship between policy performance and autocracy?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• Size of winning coalition, size of the selectorate.
• These factors determine the incentive the leader has to produce public goods as well as the bargaining power of citizens vs. the state.
• When W is large, the leader stays in power by producing public goods rather than private goods.
• When W/S is larger, the citizen is in a good bargaining position with the state, and so the leader has to raise a lot of revenue to stay in power. This gives the leader an incentive to encourage economic growth.
• Evidence shows that an increase in W leads to all kinds of good things, especially when S is large.
• Most big W, small S systems are democracies, so in some sense this explains the effect of democracy on policy performance, but not exactly (these are aspects found in democracies, they are not the definition of democracy; and many small W, small S systems (many of which would be considered autocracies) perform as well as democracies.