Individualism and political instability

Date

2021-01-01

Director

Publisher

Elsevier
Acceso abierto / Sarbide irekia
Artículo / Artikulua
Versión publicada / Argitaratu den bertsioa

Project identifier

  • AEI/Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2017-2020/PGC2018-093542-B-I00/ES/ recolecta
Impacto
No disponible en Scopus

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture and political instability using a dataset covering around 100 countries. To shed light on the causal effect of culture on political instability, the identification strategy exploits the variation in historical pathogen prevalence and the information provided by the genetic distance between countries. The results reveal that individualism has a negative and statistically significant impact on the degree of political instability, which means that this cultural trait contributes to making the political environment more stable. This finding is robust to the inclusion in the analysis of a substantial number of controls that may be correlated with both individualism and political instability, including other cultural dimensions. In fact, the relationship between individualism and political instability does not depend either on the specific measures used to quantify the level of individualism and political instability within the various countries or the estimation strategy adopted. The estimates also show that part of the observed effect of individualism is due to the impact of institutional quality, which acts as a transmission channel linking this cultural trait and political instability.

Description

Keywords

Individualism, Collectivism, Political instability, Institutions

Department

Economía / Ekonomia / Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE

Faculty/School

Degree

Doctorate program

item.page.cita

Ezcurra, R. (2021) Individualism and political instability. European Journal of Political Economy, 66, 101959. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020.101959.

item.page.rights

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Licencia

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