POLI 441 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Autocracy

• School: McGill University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLI 441
• Professor: Krzysztof Pelc

Document Summary

Week 6 lecture - the supply for protection. The politics, and the behaviour of trade politicians. We are interested in how responsive governments are to the demands of citizens and groups, and which demands they favour over others. The biggest cleavage in this sense is regime type - democracy - autocracy. Cooperation means accepting bounds on your behaviour in exchange for your partners constraining their behaviour as well. From the point of view of voters, institutions resolve an informational problem: who do we blame. They monitor state behaviour and sound an alarm when they see extractive policies - they tell us something about the behaviour of governments. The government faces a credibility problem and it cannot be believed. As a result, any economic downturn can be interpreted as voluntary distortionary trade policy. Governments are better off by delegating power away to institutions in order to be believed and to solve their credibility problem.