ERF 26th Annual Conference
Crises, Uncertainty, and Reform – Disentangling the Mechanisms of a Conventional Wisdom in Fractionalized Polities
No.
ERF26_144
Publisher
ERF
Date
August, 2020
Topic
P. Economic Systems
This working paper outlines a theory and presents preliminary results to analyze the micro mechanisms of political collaboration during crises in fractionalized, clientelist polities. Our paper advances the literature on the so-called crisis hypothesis, which is one of the most widely cited but yet underexplored theories in the literature on the political economy of reform. Our preliminary results suggest that outgoing governments, under uncertainty about the allocation of political power in a post-crisis environment, prioritize legislation geared towards individualized, clientelist services, in particular trade licenses and the registration of new associations. We hypothesize that the mechanism by which this works is the effort to rally support for a new regime post-crisis in the absence of electoral incentives that structure political life. We base our analysis on a novel dataset of legislative activity in Lebanon by investigating two periods of crisis, the events that followed the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and the current period that started in October 2019. Future work will augment the methodological approach. The results have important policy implications, in particular for the design of international assistance programs.
Research Fellows
Mounir Mahmalat
Economist and FCV Country Coordinator for Central...
Authors
Sami Atallah
Director, The Policy Initiative