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The link between the climate and culture has been examined in a variety of contexts.  A recent post by Volha Charnysh discusses various examples, such as the relationship between seasonality and the adoption of agriculture (Matranga, 2019), climatic risk and cooperation (Buggle and Durante, 2021), and exposure to adverse natural shocks and religiosity (Bentzen, 2019). … Continue reading Historical Subsistence Strategies and Culture

By Alberto Bisin and Andrea Moro Persistence studies in Historical Economics document the persistence of some historical phenomenon and often leverage this persistence to identify causal relationships of interest in the present. They constitute a sizeable component of Historical political economy and, more generally, of Historical economics: about 10%, according to Cioni et al. (2021)’s … Continue reading LATE for history and other stories

The recent Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision by the Supreme Court is, to me, the sharpest nail yet in the coffin for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  While the much-discussed Shelby v. Holder decision severely weakened the ability of the federal government to block restrictive voting measures before they are enacted, the most … Continue reading Will American Democracy Reach Retirement Age?

In the era of European colonialism, Christian missionaries spread to practically every corner of the globe. By 1900, they had evangelized 700 million people, nearly half the world population. The conventional wisdom in the social science literature is that Protestant missionaries spread literacy and democracy. The argument is straightforward: Protestant missionaries founded thousands of schools … Continue reading The Missionary Roots of Nationalism?

Today I’m going to talk about an annual review that Tom Pepinsky and I are doing, on historical persistence! We have a draft up on SSRN (comments welcome!), but I’ll discuss some of the highlights here — Broadstreet readers might be particularly interested in the recent publication statistics for historical persistence papers. Tom and I … Continue reading The Persistence of Historical Persistence

Almost 20 years ago, Margaret Levi wrote an essay titled “The State of the Study of the State,” which was published in Political Science: The State of the Discipline (edited by Ira Katznelson and Helen Milner). In the essay, Levi reviewed the booming literature on state formation and state building, but also noticed that “After … Continue reading The Study of the State: A Brief Intellectual History

What can we learn from Britain’s laissez-faire experiment? Guest post by W. Walker Hanlon, NYU Stern. In the nineteenth century, Britain undertook the boldest experiment in small government ever attempted by an industrialized and technologically advanced country. This experience has had an enormous intellectual influence. It shaped the views of, among others, Karl Marx, Friedrich … Continue reading What can we learn from Britain’s laissez-faire experiment?

Formal mechanisms for the enforcement of property rights and the resolution of disputes are thought to be essential to long term economic development and political stability. But how do these get established and what makes people in a society willing to use them? More recent attempts to create such mechanisms in places like post-Soviet eastern … Continue reading The Demand for Extra-Local Forms of Dispute Resolution