College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item The Republic and its Problems: Alexander Hamilton and James Madison on the 18th Century Critique of Republics(2009) Evans, Michael Clinton; McIntosh, Wayne V.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study offers a new interpretation of the theoretical basis of the political alliance and rupture between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The central thesis is that Madison was correct that his and Hamilton's disagreement was rooted in their different orientations toward republican versus monarchical governments. Although for the past century scholars have rejected Madison's claim that Hamilton harbored monarchical principles and intentions, this study argues that the textual record suggests that he did. More specifically, it is demonstrated that there is no evidence that Hamilton had a genuine principled commitment to republican government. Moreover, the evidence does indicate that he always believed America would be better served by emulating the British mixed regime, complete with a hereditary monarch, and that he sought to put the United States on a developmental path toward such a regime. This difference between Hamilton and Madison was based on both disparate political principles and differences in their prudential judgments about the possibility that the Americans could overcome what this study calls the "18th century critique of republics." This powerful tenet of Enlightenment political science claimed that two sociopolitical processes tended to transform republics into despotic or, at best, limited monarchical regimes. One of these processes, "the republican violent death," was thought to naturally lead republics into anarchy and eventually monarchy or despotism. The other process, "the republican security dilemma," consisted of several pressures placed on regimes by their external security environment to adopt policies and establish institutions that undermined the domestic requisites for republican liberty. The most salient implication of the 18th century critique of republics was that the British balanced constitution presented the best model for durable liberty under modern conditions. This study argues that Madison and Hamilton were united in taking this critique seriously and that they both believed the two processes could have led to despotic regimes throughout North America if something had not been done to curb what they perceived as the excessive democracy and sovereign pretensions of the State governments. Their principal prudential difference was that Madison, unlike Hamilton, believed he had found republican cures for these republican diseases.Item Civil Liberties, Mobility, and Economic Development(2009) BenYishay, Ariel; Betancourt, Roger R.; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)To what extent do civil liberties affect economic development? This dissertation addresses this question in two essays. The first chapter (joint with Roger Betancourt) provides a new economic interpretation of civil liberties as rights over a person's most basic human asset: her own self. The importance of these rights to economic development is based on the principle that property rights-defined over a broad set of "property''-are crucial for economic growth. The empirical literature to date shows little support for such claims related to civil liberties, however, with ambiguous evidence on the role of these rights in driving long-run growth. Using newly available data from Freedom House, we find that one of the recently disaggregated categories of civil liberties explains income differences across countries more powerfully and robustly than any other measure of property rights or the rule of law considered. This component, entitled "Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights,'' evaluates the extent of personal choice over issues such as where to work, study, and live, as well as a broader set of property rights and other choices. While the first chapter finds that greater civil liberties can substantially improve long-run economic development, the second chapter identifies a key friction in this relationship. In countries that lack complementary institutions, civil liberties governing individual mobility can complicate credit transactions. By allowing individuals to move to locations where less is known about their prior defaults, mobility freedoms induce opaqueness and can result in credit rationing. I develop an instrumental variable estimation to study these effects, which would otherwise be complicated by omitted variable bias and endogeneity. Using household survey data from Guatemala, I instrument for individual migration with the interaction of violence patterns and individual sensitivities toward that violence. Using this approach, I find that the act of migration within a country actually causes individuals to have significantly less access to credit, primarily because lenders are concerned about these borrowers' opportunistic default.