Podcast appearances and mentions of barry weingast

In this episode, we talk about how strong legislatures emerge. When we think about what makes a political system a democracy, we usually think of one key ingredient as being an elected legislature that can constrain the executive: an elected assembly that serves as a check on executive whim and has the ultimate say on core matters of public policy. But where do strong legislatures come from? As political scientists, we commonly tell ourselves an origin story -- first set out by Douglass North and Barry Weingast -- about the emergence of parliamentary strength in 17th century England that goes something like this: the monarchy needed to borrow money. But before wealthy elites were willing to lend to the Crown, they wanted to make sure that they would be paid back. Thus, parliamentary prominence arose as a way for the Crown to credibly tie its own hands and for elites to hold the executive to its commitments. A strong parliament emerged from the underlying balance of bargaining power between the sovereign and elites. Our guest today, Dr. Ken Opalo, an assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, argues that this paradigmatic origin story does not travel very well beyond Europe. In his 2019 book, Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies, Ken examines how strong and weak legislatures emerged as African nations transitioned from autocracy to multi-party democracy. The book centers on the comparison of Kenya and Zambia, two countries that democratized in the early 1990s, shifting from single-party to multi-party rule. Both countries had had open legislatures during the postcolonial, authoritarian period, legislatures that are now elected through multi-party competition. But while multi-party elections turned Kenya’s legislature into a strong assembly that frequently bucks the president, Zambia’s democratic legislature follows the president’s lead about as frequently as it did during the authoritarian period. We talk with Ken about why democracy generated a strong legislature in one country but continued executive dominance in the other. This is, fundamentally, a conversation about how to theorize and study institutional development as democracy emerges in postcolonial settings. Ken explains what is distinctive about such contexts and why models of the rise of executive constraint derived from the European experience do such a poor job of explaining outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa. We also talk about why scholars have missed key institutional variation across African autocracies: variation that is not picked up in standard cross-national datasets but that has crucial implications for legislative development once democracy takes hold. The scholarly works discussed in this episode can be found on our website.

Barry Weingast, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, talks about the ideas in his forthcoming book with Doug North and John Wallis, A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Weingast talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how violence shapes political institutions, the role of competition in politics and economics, and why most development advice from successful nations fails to lift poor nations out of poverty. Actually released 13 Aug 2007.

What role did guilds play in the economic development of Europe? Why do bad institutions persist throughout history? Join us for this conversation between Mark Pennington (King's College London) and Sheilagh Ogilvie (University of Cambridge) for a discussion of her new 900-year history and economic analysis of the European Guilds. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). The Guest Sheilagh Ogilvie is Professor of Economic History in Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews (1979), Cambridge (1985), and Chicago (1992). She has been successively Lecturer (1989), Reader (2000), and Professor of Economic History (2004) in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge.She is the author of State Corporatism and Proto-Industry (Cambridge, 1997), Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003), Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds, 1000-1800 (Cambridge, 2011) and the editor of European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge, 1996), Germany: A New Social and Economic History (3 vols, London, 1996/2003), and Revolution des Fleißes, Revolution des Konsums? (Ostfildern, 2015). She has published journal articles on institutions and economic development, the economics of guilds, merchants, rural communities, serfdom, consumption, retailing, occupational structure, demography, proto-industry, banking, female labour force participation, regulation, the growth of the state, and social capital. She is the winner of the Gyorgy Ranki Prize (1999), the Anton Gindeley Prize (2004), the René Kuczynski Prize (2004), and the Stanley Z. Pech Prize (2008). She has been the director of research projects on “Social Structure in Bohemia, 1500-1750” (British Academy, 2001-03), “Economy, Gender, and Social Capital in the German Demographic Transition” (Leverhulme Trust, 2005-07), and “Human Well-Being and the ‘Industrious Revolution': Consumption, Gender and Social Capital in a German Developing Economy, 1600-1900” (ESRC, 2008-12). She held a British Academy/Wolfson Research Professorship (2013-16), during which she explored the relationship between human capital and long-term economic growth. Her book on the economics of guilds was published with Princeton University Press in March 2019. Skip Ahead 1:03: Sheilagh, why have you decided to bring your work together in a volume of this kind? 4:13: How would you define a guild? What are the key features of such an organisation? 8:40: The title of the book is The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis. Economists often disagree about things. One of the things they disagree about is the efficiency properties of these guilds. Some would argue that these guilds played an important function – they were efficiency enhancing, they might have been necessary for growth. I know that's not a view that you hold. But could you give us an indication of what those arguments are? 14:22: These are basically arguments which are suggesting that some kind of market failures arise in these situations, and you have an institutional response to address the market failure. In this instance the guild is seen as the institutional mechanism to solve it. 15:32: Your view as I understand it is very much that guilds should be seen as rent seeking institutions which were actually seeking exclusive privileges for the members – and rather than solving a market failure, they essentially create a different sort of failure, which is that certain people are excluded from markets, there's a lack of competition, you actually don't get the quality control or professional certification that you might have gotten from an alternative institution. Is that a fair summary of your view? 20:14: So this is saying that guilds are about distributional matters; they're institutions that are quite conflictual in terms of grappling with a part of the pie rather than increasing the size of the overall pie. 20:56: Can you say a bit more about the role of the state in your particular theory? Some of the work in this area that's focused on guilds from a rosier viewpoint often depicts them as a kind of bottom-up private order institution that arises spontaneously to solve an efficiency problem. Whereas your view suggests that these institutions were embedded in political structures of power and authority which were used for these distributional purposes. Why do some people hold that rosier view? 26:45: I think in your first book you used the term ‘state corporatism.' Would you describe guilds as corporatist institutions? They're a kind of negotiation between a semi private organization and the state? 27:49: Given that you subscribe more to this view of guilds as rent-seeking or privilege-seeking organisations as opposed to efficiency enhancing ones, could you describe the ways in which guilds reduced efficiency? 36:02: Reading your account, this is quite a damning indictment of these institutions. There really is evidence of rent seeking—the scale of these markups is at a level where… how could anybody think that they have any beneficial properties? I guess the contrary view is that, OK, from today's point of view, these were inefficient practices. But if you look at the context at the time, what was the alternative to providing the kind of mechanisms that would address market failures? 43:39: So in your view, you didn't need guilds to address the kind of training market failures. What about asymmetrical information and quality controls? Did you find evidence of alternative mechanisms to deal with those? 49:41: This reminds me of a conversation I had with Barry Weingast – his argument is, yes, many of these kind of restrictions, when looked at through today's lens, we would see them as inefficient and would want to get rid of them. But you have a slightly different take on them if you realize that the alternative might not be a free market type situation—it might actually be one where… you don't have a market at all because you have societies embroiled in violence. And the various restrictions and privileges at least provide some rudiments of peace and order in a context where the alternative would be something worse than that… do you see cases where states seem to be able to avoid violence without having guild privileges or some of these distributional deals? 58:00: Why did guild institutions decline? As I understand your argument about why they persisted for so long, it's basically a kind of public choice, rent seeking argument, which says that you've got relatively small organised groups…facilitated by public authorities through these corporatist deals, they gain privileges which are inefficient, but the reason why you don't have …people challenging that is either because they're politically disenfranchised or they face a huge collective action problem… If you take that kind of explanation, it implies that those privileges would be hard to break down. 01:06: I understand it's a difficult question, but …I understand the explanation you're giving there is a kind of accidental one. That is, by accident some factors come together and then we're able to break free of guilds. I guess that's not an unsatisfactory explanation in some ways, but I was wondering if you've thought of more positive explanations… I'm thinking of Deirdre McCloskey's work on why we have the industrial revolution, and that's a more ideas-based explanation…. Do you have any sympathy with that kind of view? 01:12: I want to ask you about a theme closely related with our research centre, and that's thinking about the relationship between informal and formal institutions and how that can sometimes go wrong… there's a tendency to see community as providing certain kinds of services in a singularly romantic view rather than seeing it as double edged, where you can recognize that there's a positive side to traders getting together but at the same time recognize the dark side- the exclusion as the flipside of community.

What are the paradoxes of economic development? How can we preserve liberal democracy in an era of populism and polarisation? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Professor Barry Weingast of Stanford University joins Professor Mark Pennington of King's College London for a conversation on the key lessons we've learned from the study of political economy. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. The Guest Barry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Weingast's research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook or twitter (@csgskcl). Skip Ahead 1:00 In response to the age old question, ‘why are some countries rich and others poor?' you argue that some countries fail to develop because they are stuck in a ‘violence trap.' What do you mean by that? 3:46: How does your explanation for the persistence of poverty differ from others? 6:08: How can developing countries escape from the violence trap? 7:50: Economists have often assumed that markets existed in societies before states began to interfere with them. You argue that markets don't necessarily exist in many developing societies, but violence does. Why do so many economists have a different starting point? 9:43: In many ways, you're arguing against the idea that markets are natural phenomena. You argue instead that markets have to be sustained within certain institutional conditions- but whether you actually get to those institutional conditions is the big question. 13:22: It's not only markets that aren't natural phenomena—democracy is also not a natural phenomenon. How can we build democracy where it doesn't exist? 15:12: Is there anything that external bodies or national policies can recommend to help governments reduce the stakes of power? 17:35: How do you respond to Easterly's arguments about foreign intervention? 18:52: Looking at your insights into early economic development in Europe, much of the good outcomes are unintended. Could we conclude that development isn't something one can plan or design policy for? 21:48: What is an example of a democracy-promoting policy that isn't just focused on creating elections? 23:23: What is the role of beliefs or moral attitudes in your framework? 25:55: Is there a role for political entrepreneurs to help societies out of their violence traps? 27:28: Do you see any implications of your research for contemporary events? Today we're seeing a lot of ‘us versus them' zero sum thinking. Can people find ways to discover mutual gains from cooperation in this environment? 30:25: What is the contemporary importance of your work on market-preserving federalism? 35:35: How can we explain the current shift in public opinion against market-preserving federalism across the west? 39:02: What are your future projects?

Barry Weingast, professor of political science at Stanford University and senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of law. Weingast takes issue with some of the standard views of law, and proposes a better way to understand law. The two discuss the fundamental principles of law, how it can emerge in a decentralized way to resolve disputes over property and other commercial and social interactions. Examples include Iceland, Ancient Greece, and California during the gold rush. Also considered are how laws coordinate expectations and the way that social pressure can be used to enforce law in a decentralized fashion.

Barry Weingast, professor of political science at Stanford University and senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the nature of law. Weingast takes issue with some of the standard views of law, and proposes a better way to understand law. The two discuss the fundamental principles of law, how it can emerge in a decentralized way to resolve disputes over property and other commercial and social interactions. Examples include Iceland, Ancient Greece, and California during the gold rush. Also considered are how laws coordinate expectations and the way that social pressure can be used to enforce law in a decentralized fashion.

Barry Weingast, the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the role of violence and the threat of violence in maintaining destructive economic policies that reduce growth and development. Weingast argues that the threat of violence encourages leaders to create monopolies and other unproductive policies to pay off special interests that would otherwise threaten a coup or revolution. Weingast shows there is a surprising amount of violent regime change in modern times and discusses how this discourages growth-enhancing economic policies. The conversation closes with an analysis of similar ideas in Book III of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Barry Weingast, the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the role of violence and the threat of violence in maintaining destructive economic policies that reduce growth and development. Weingast argues that the threat of violence encourages leaders to create monopolies and other unproductive policies to pay off special interests that would otherwise threaten a coup or revolution. Weingast shows there is a surprising amount of violent regime change in modern times and discusses how this discourages growth-enhancing economic policies. The conversation closes with an analysis of similar ideas in Book III of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Barry Weingast, the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the role of violence and the threat of violence in maintaining destructive economic policies that reduce growth and development. Weingast argues that the threat of violence encourages leaders to create monopolies and other unproductive policies to pay off special interests that would otherwise threaten a coup or revolution. Weingast shows there is a surprising amount of violent regime change in modern times and discusses how this discourages growth-enhancing economic policies. The conversation closes with an analysis of similar ideas in Book III of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Barry Weingast, the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the role of violence and the threat of violence in maintaining destructive economic policies that reduce growth and development. Weingast argues that the threat of violence encourages leaders to create monopolies and other unproductive policies to pay off special interests that would otherwise threaten a coup or revolution. Weingast shows there is a surprising amount of violent regime change in modern times and discusses how this discourages growth-enhancing economic policies. The conversation closes with an analysis of similar ideas in Book III of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Barry Weingast, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, talks about the ideas in his forthcoming book with Doug North and John Wallis, A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Weingast talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how violence shapes political institutions, the role of competition in politics and economics, and why most development advice from successful nations fails to lift poor nations out of poverty.

Barry Weingast, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, talks about the ideas in his forthcoming book with Doug North and John Wallis, A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Weingast talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how violence shapes political institutions, the role of competition in politics and economics, and why most development advice from successful nations fails to lift poor nations out of poverty.