The question of who guards the guards is intimately connected with broader questions of state capacity and the establishment of a monopoly of violence in society, something which is often viewed as the defining feature of the modern state. But to establish such a monopoly, civilian rulers need not only to build an effective military, but also to control it. In this paper we study how governments may solve this problem when they recognize that their decisions to build a strong army may have ramifications for subsequent coups.

In this paper we take for granted that the poverty of Sub-Saharan Africa is to a large part explained by its political and economic institutions. As citizens Africans do not have the incentives to save and invest, as politicians they do not have the incentive to provide public goods. We focus on the issue of how Africa developed such institutions. Historically, no society had the types of institutions required for modern economic growth, though a few had elements of them for quite long periods. Growth arose when institutional transitions took place. We argue that the historical dynamics of institutions in Africa have been different. Processes of state formation seem to have been delayed relative to Eurasia, and state institutions appear to have been intensely absolutist and patrimonial. These initial institutions interacted in a perverse way with a series of shocks that hit Africa, in particular the slave trade in the early modern period, and colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Africa countries emerged at independence with a complex path dependent set of institutions that were probably even worse than those which they had at the time of colonization. It was these that precipitated authoritarianism, sustained economic decline and reinforced the poverty we see in Africa today.

In this paper, we suggest a new rationale for the existence of interlinked contracts in the agrarian economies of developing countries. Using the framework of an infinitely repeated game with discounting, we show that interlinked contracts can help the dominant parties to collude, in cases where collusion is not possible with noninterlinked contracts. This occurs because either interlinkage pools incentive constraints across markets, or it affects the incentives of agents to accept deviating contracts. We illustrate these mechanisms by considering the case of interlinkage between markets for credit and share tenancy. The model that is used to formalize the second mechanism is characterized by frictions in the tenancy market, which we model using the standard framework of search and matching.

We revisit and critically reevaluate the widely accepted modernization hypothesis which claims that per capita income causes the creation and the consolidation of democracy. Existing studies find support for this hypothesis because they fail to control for the presence of omitted variables. Controlling for these factors either by including country fixed effects in a linear model or by including parameterized random effects in a nonlinear double hazard model removes the correlation between income and the likelihood of transitions to and from democratic regimes. In addition, the estimated fixed effects from the linear model are related to historical factors that affect both the level of income per capita and the likelihood of democracy in a country. This evidence is consistent with the idea that events during critical historical junctures can lead to divergent political–economic development paths, some leading to prosperity and democracy, others to relative poverty and non-democracy.