Autocracy as a Safety Valve for Democracy’s Elites:
Evidence from the British Caribbean∗
Christian Dippel†
September 22, 2013
Abstract
Coups that induce switches from democracy to autocracy are commonly viewed as
being external to the democratic process. However, an autocratic take-over may be
initiated by elites inside parliament if these prefer exclusive access to an autocrat over
becoming marginalized in a democracy that is becoming more broad-based. I provide
evidence for this mechanism in data on the 19th century British Caribbean, where local
parliaments voted to abolish themselves and invite the Crown to rule without checks
and balances. These abolitions of democracy are explained by increasing political
competition from freed slaves and are shown to have subsequently shielded elites
from popular pressure while maintaining their insider access to government, thus
keeping the affected colonies on a long-run path of elite-dominated oligarchic rule.
Keywords: Democracy, Oligarchy, Regime Change, Elite Persistence, Political Inequality, Institutions, Franchise Extension.
∗
I thank Scott Ashworth, Dwayne Benjamin, Leah Boustan, Ann Carlos, Melissa Dell, Gilles Duranton, Stan Engerman, Fred Finan, Price Fishback, Morgan Kousser, Gary Libecap, Peter Morrow, Gary Richardson, Ken Shotts, Guido
Tabellini, Francesco Trebbi, Dan Trefler, Stephane Wolton, Alex Whalley and seminar participants at Caltech, Stanford,
UBC, UCI, Yale, Chicago Harris, the LACEA Political Economy meetings and the NBER POL and DAE meetings for
valuable discussions and insightful comments.
†
UCLA Anderson School of Management (email: [email protected])
“If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change.”
- Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
1
Introduction
There is a longstanding literature in economics and comparative politics that seeks to explain
when democracy consolidates and when it is prone to revert back to autocracy. Modernization
theory for example focuses on the forces that lead countries to transition to democracy (Lipset
(1959)). A related literature has focused on what makes democracy survive once it is in place
(Przeworski et al. (2000), Acemoglu and Robinson (2006)). This literature usually treats the dictators or military juntas that may attempt an autocratic coup as external threats that strike if democracy is weakened at a critical juncture. However, elites inside parliament may actually invite an
autocratic coup if they are in danger of losing their power to the political competition, particularly
if this political competition is a symptom of broadening democratic representation. In the 1967
coup d’état in Greece for example, politicians of the incumbent conservative party openly invited
a military coup, out of a fear of seeing the left-leaning Center Union party gain a parliamentary
majority in the upcoming election (Kassimeris (2006)). In the same year in Sierra Leone, when the
incumbent prime minister Albert Margai narrowly lost the election to Siaka Stevens, he had the
latter deposed by a military coup within hours after taking office (Cartwright (1970)).1
It is usually hard to know whether autocratic regime change was initiated from inside or outside the democratic process. To get around this issue, this paper takes advantage of the unique
institutional set-up in the British colonial empire, which allowed colonial parliaments to vote
themselves out of existence and invite the colonial administration to take over all functions of
government. The internal initiation of the regime switch was openly observable and constituted
a switch from democracy to autocracy in that there were no formal checks and balances on the
colonial Executive after the regime switch. The paper focuses in particular on the 19th British
Caribbean, which saw many instances of regime changes from democracy to autocracy.
This paper uses data from the Colonial Blue Books, annual statistical accounts that were sent
to London from each individual colony to report on local conditions, to test the hypothesis that
1
Stevens resumed his office a year later but himself began to erode democratic institutions, making Sierra Leone an
autocracy until the Civil War of 1991 (Przeworski et al. (2000)).
1
these internally driven switches from democracy to autocracy were elites’ response to the threat
of losing their parliamentary majority. The driving force behind political competition was the
Empire-wide abolition of slavery, which freed more than 90% of the British Caribbean population
and caused the gradual entry of a new political class of freedmen.2 Against this backdrop, elected
parliaments in almost all of the British Caribbean colonies voted to abolish themselves between
1854 to 1877.
The key finding of the paper is that the instance and timing of the dismantling of parliaments
is explained by increases in political competition, measured by electoral turnover. In the baseline,
a 10% increase in electoral turnover raised the probability that a parliament voted to abolish itself
by 2% in a given year. I pursue two strategies to address the possibility of omitted factors driving the differential timing of regime switches: First, I control directly for a number of potential
confounding drivers of regime change. Secondly, I pursue an instrumental variable (IV) strategy
based on the Caribbean-wide introduction in 1854 of legislation that facilitated land transfers, interacted with cross-sectional measures of the ability to obtain the land needed to register their vote
after Abolition. In the OLS, I sequentially include the stock of colonies that had already abolished
their parliaments, increased pressure for more direct control by the colonial administration after
the Indian Mutiny, and finally decade and year fixed effects. The results are very robust to these
specifications. In the IV setup, the first stage and reduced form estimates show that the legislation
that facilitated land transfers significantly increased both electoral turnover and the probability
of dismantling elected parliament but that it did so significantly less where land was harder to
obtain for freedmen. The IV estimates suggest that a 10% increase in electoral turnover raised the
probability that a parliament voted to abolish itself by 4% in a given year, roughly double the OLS
estimates.3 While data on the franchise begins to be reported too late to be useful for estimation
at the colony level, I can show a strong relationship between electoral turnover and the expanding franchise at the sub-colony parish level, where the cross-sectional sample size is increased to
over 100: Increases in the franchise significantly increased electoral turnover, both in specifications
with parish fixed effects (identifying within parishes over time) and with electoral-cycle fixed ef2
The speed with which this occurred hinged on the increase in freedmen’s ownership of land, which gave the right
both to vote and to run for office.
3
This suggests that the OLS may suffer from attenuation bias because electoral turnover measures political competition with noise.
2
fects (identifying across parishes within a colony).
I provide several pieces of additional evidence in support of the key hypothesis that elites from
inside the democratic process initiated the transition to autocracy because they preferred insider
access to the colonial autocrat over losing their hold on parliament: First, if freedmen’s political
threat was enough to cause a pre-emptive regime switch, then freedmen should have had real political influence before. Corresponding to this intuition, I document that there was a clear electoral
cycle in public spending before the dismantling of parliaments. Parliaments voted systematically
more expenditure on education and on a basket of other public goods in election years, relative
to other years in the same electoral cycle.4 Second, I compare public expenditures before and
after the regime switch. Across specifications, spending on both education and on other public
goods declined with the dismantling of elected parliaments. This decline in public good provision suggests that ceding their parliamentary powers to the colonial autocrat actually entrenched
and strengthened the planter elites.5 The estimated effect of the regime switch is most significant
when the “true” regime switch is assumed to have occurred 2-3 years after the de jure switch.
Further analysis reveals that the reason is that public good provision actually increased in the first
three years after the switch to autocracy. This is consistent with the view that elites strategically
delayed utilizing the regime change in their favor in order to secure a smooth transition. The
documented long run shift in expenditure suggests that the regime switch shielded elites from
popular pressure while maintained their insider access to the colonial administration so that they
could get their preferred policies set. As a third source of additional evidence I check directly for
preferential elite access to the colonial autocrat after the regime switch. Two facts are consistent
with the the preferential access hypothesis: Old political families continued to hold about 80% of
appointed legislative positions as late as 20 years after the regime switch. And these old families
were disproportionally from the plantation parishes within each colony.
This paper speaks to a well-established literature on the consolidation and stability of democratic regimes (Przeworski et al. (2000), Acemoglu and Robinson (2006)). In that literature, political
competition often leads to a strengthening of democracy: In Acemoglu and Robinson (2006), elites
4
Educational expenditure was the expenditure categories that was most consistently available. The basket of other
public goods contains all public goods associated with public health. On both dimension. the interests of freedmen and
planter elites clearly diverged.
5
The timing of the effect is consistent with elites deliberately delaying the use of their new powers.
3
make political concessions such as extending the franchise in oder to preserve their economic
rents. In Besley et al. (2012), elites strengthen checks and balances in anticipation of a higher likelihood of a non-elite future ruler.6 By contrast, this paper shows that political competition may
lead elites to abolish democracy altogether and initiate a regime switch to autocracy if they believe
they can maintain insider access to the autocratic government.
Relatedly, this paper contributes to a literature on the nexus of endogenous institutional change,
elite persistence and economic growth (North and Weingast (1989), Acemoglu et al. (2005), Puga
and Trefler (2011)). The evidence presented here fits best into the theory of the “simultaneous
change and persistence in institutions,” in which changes in de jure institutions have no consequences because they are offset by changes in elites’ de facto collective action (Acemoglu and
Robinson (2008)). On the empirical side, the closest relation is to studies of the politics of the
post-Reconstruction US South. In the South, literacy tests in combination with discriminatory
schooling, the Ku Klux Clan and Jim Crow Laws were sufficient to re-establish the planter elites’
dominance over the democratic process after the Union Army pulled out in 1877 (Kousser (1974),
Margo (1990), Naidu (2009)). There are several noteworthy differences between the US South and
the Caribbean, explored in Section 4.4, which meant that a Southern equilibrium was not feasible
for Caribbean planter elites.7,8
This paper also speaks to an influential line of research that has advocated historical colonialism as a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of institutions on long run development
(Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002), Engerman and Sokoloff (2002)). This is the first paper that studies
panel-variation of concrete colonial institutions. Section 6.3 presents some additional facts on this
6
Other theories have advanced economic explanations for the consolidation of democracy. In all of these theories,
economic growth means that elites benefit more from broader representation than they lose from giving up their dominance of the democratic process, a central tenet of modernization theory (Lipset (1959)): In Bourguignon and Verdier
(2000), the franchise is tied to education and elites gain more from broad-based education in a modernized economy.
In Acemoglu and Robinson (2000), revolts by the poor become costlier as economic prosperity increases. In Lizzeri
and Persico (2004), wealthy capitalists’ and workers’ interests are aligned against the landed gentry and capitalist elites
therefore seek to strengthen the workers. These mechanisms explain the wide-spread expansion of the franchise to
the poor in the 19th century (Engerman and Sokoloff (2005)), but none of them were at play in the Caribbean and the
Caribbean experience therefore contrasts sharply with that of Europe and most of the rest of the Americas.
7
Nonetheless, Caribbean elites’ response of abandoning democratic institutions was not without equivalent in the
US South: Dallas County in Alabama asked its governor to dissolve its county government in 1880 when a black
majority was looming and the county government was not re-established until 1900 (Kousser (1999)).
8
Major changes in democratic institutions did occur in the US South after the 1965 Civil Rights Act, when municipal
governments’ electoral rules changed in black-dominated US cities to entrench white votes (Trebbi et al. (2008)). Unlike
in the 19th century Caribbean, these institutional changes were not enough to prevent major concessions in public
spending towards the newly enfranchised (Husted and Kenny (1997)).
4
variation and discusses what it implies for the use of initial conditions at the time of settlement as
an instrument for long run development. Finally, this paper contributes to a large body of literature on historical colonialism and Caribbean economic history. See respectively Lange (2004) and
Iyer (2010) as well as Engerman (1982, 1984); Holt (1991); Henry and Miller (2009) for extensive
references.
In the following, Section 2 provides the background, Section 3 discusses the data, Section 4
presents the key results on regime change, Section 5 provides additional supporting evidence,
Section 6 provides some additional discussion and Section 7 concludes.
2
Background
2.1
The Political Consequences of the Abolition of Slavery
Focusing on the Caribbean has the advantage that it presents a set of colonies that were highly
comparable in their histories and economic structures as well as arguably being exposed to the
same shocks over time. More importantly, there was a measurable driving force behind all regime
changes in the data, which can be explored for empirical analysis. The Caribbean colonies were
settled early, in the 17th century, and by British small-hold farmers much like in the Chesapeake.
These small-hold farmers sought to control taxes and spending through local Assemblies (Taylor
(2002, p. 246)), which “seriously curtailed the powers of the governors in the colonies” (Morrell
and Parker (1969). While large-scale sugar plantations had completely displaced the smaller tobacco plantations by the 18th century, the Assembly system remained, albeit with a franchise that
was everywhere highly concentrated (Dunn and Parker (1972)).9
However, the legacy of the Caribbean’s smallhold origins meant that the property holdings
required to vote were actually very low as they had typically stayed at their original 10 acres
threshold (Wrong (1923)).10 After slavery was abolished by an Act of English Parliament in 1834,
many freedmen left the plantations and began to purchase small-holds.11,12 Black leaders quickly
9
Wrong (1923) states that throughout the pre-Abolition Caribbean “it was distinctly the exception for a member of
the legislature to be returned by more than 10 votes.”
10
The franchise in the Caribbean as elsewhere in the British colonies was obtained primarily through land ownership.
The franchise rules reported in the Colonial Blue Books show that there is very little variation in the 10 acre threshold
across colonies.
11
Abolition became effective in 1838 after a two-year transitional period called Apprenticeship.
12
This happened through purchases of marginal plantation lands or Crown lands. Squatting, pervasive throughout
5
recognized that small-hold expansion meant franchise expansion.13 In Jamaica for example, “Baptist ministers tried to mobilize the dormant black electorate. They encouraged their members to
purchase freeholds and register to vote” (Holt (1991)). The result of the gradual enfranchisement
of the freedmen was an increase in political competition: “The planters steadily lost their political dominance as disputatious Assemblies were infiltrated by men of color independent of the
plantation economy” (Burroughs (1999)).14
Finally, from 1854 to 1877, 11 of the Caribbean parliaments simply abolished themselves. Parliament would vote on a bill to abolish parliament and invite the Crown to write a new constitution
for the colony. In all cases, this new constitution followed the standard template of Crown Colony
rule: All functions of government were controlled by the colonial administration, with the governor appointing the local legislature and judiciary. Locally elected parliament was replaced with a
legislature that partly consisted of colonial officials and partly of local appointees. Historians have
argued that these abolitions of Caribbean parliaments were planter elites’ response to the political competition of freedmen: While they had traditionally “jealously guarded [the Assemblies]
against interference by the colonial adminstration” (Wrong (1923)), Lowes (1994, p. 35) argues that
“in the end, the demand of an increasingly restive nonwhite middle class for a voice in island affairs proved the greater fear and they voted themselves out of office.” Similarly, Ashdown (1979,
p. 34) argues that “the colonies gave up their elected assemblies voluntarily, for in most cases the
white, privileged classes preferred direct imperial government to the government of the colored
classes who were slowly obtaining greater representation in the legislative councils.”
3
3.1
Data
The British Caribbean
There were 17 British colonies in the Caribbean, founded in three waves. The first wave - Antigua,
the Bahamas, Bermuda, Barbados, Honduras, Jamaica, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts and the Virgin
the Caribbean, also gave legal title after 12 years on private land and 60 years on Crown lands (Craton (1997, p. 390)).
13
Contrary to the situation in Europe, the franchise in the Caribbean was therefore expanding without any change to
the de jure rules that regulated the right to vote.
14
The main conflict of interest between the planters and freedmen was on the issue of taxation and public good
provision. Freedmen’s primary concern was land re-distribution and public good provision. Planters were naturally
averse to land re-distribution and were also dis-interested in the expansion of education and health services (Sewell
(1861, p 39), Dookhan (1977), Brizan (1984, p 163)).
6
TABLE 1 -­‐ Descriptives
Colony
Antigua
Bermuda
Bahamas
Barbados
Dominica
Grenada
Br Honduras
Jamaica
Montserrat
Nevis
St Kitts
St Vincent
Tobago
Virgin Islands
Br Guyana
St Lucia Trinidad
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Year Founded
1632
1612
1650
1629
1763
1763
1638
1655
1634
1623
1628
1763
1763
1672
1803
1803
1797
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Year of
Inst. Change
1867
1862
1876
1869
1860
1861
1867
1867
1866
1873
1855
n/a
n/a
n/a
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Population
1836
35188
8862
20203
105812
16207
17751
8235
381951
6647
7434
21578
26659
11456
7471
66561
17005
34650
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Pop-­‐Share
White, 1836 5.4
46.2
28.5
12.8
3.9
2.6
4.2
8.2
4.3
5.4
6.4
4.7
2.3
12.4
0.7
11.3
8
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Density
1836
125
167
2
246
21
52
4
34
65
80
113
69
38
49
6
27
7
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Slave-­‐price
1836
35
34.8
38.8
28.7
41.2
94.2
31
25.3
21.4
29.7
39.5
41.7
23.1
87.4
50.3
83.6
Note: The Data in this table is from the Blue Books and \citet{martin1839statistics}. The three late Caribbean colonies were
already founded as Crown Colonies. The two mainland colonies Honduras and Guyana had big hinterlands. I use 10\% of their
modern-day area as an approximation to their de facto extent at the time.
Islands - were founded in the 1600s by small-scale British planters. The second wave - Dominica,
Tobago, St. Vincent and Grenada - were annexed from France at the end of the Seven Year War
in 1765. They were re-settled by sugar planters from the other Caribbean islands and from the
start were endowed with the same representative institutions (Ragatz (1928, p. 112)). The last
three colonies - Trinidad, St Lucia and Guyana - were ceded to Britain between 1797 and 1803.
By then, the Crown had started to assert more authority over its colonies and these new colonies
were therefore founded under Crown Colony rule (Will (1970)). Table 1 lists the 17 colonies with
their foundation-dates, cross-sectional characteristics at the time of Abolition and the dates they
transitioned towards Crown Rule.15
,16
15
While all eleven colonies eventually switched to full Crown rule, ten of them first changed their constitution to a
transitional semi-representative system with an elected minority. Historians agree that this was a transitional mechanism with the clear end-goal of securing a majority for the full switch towards Crown Colony rule (Craig-James (2000,
p 256), Brizan (1984, p 204)). The Colonial Office List’s description of Grenada’s constitutional history reads: “The
constitution was remodeled by an Act on October 7th 1875 and a single legislative chamber was established, [which]
consisted of 8 members elected by the people and 9 nominated by the Crown. This Assembly at its first meeting on
February 9th 1976 addressed the Queen that it had passed a bill for its own extinction” (Britain (1879, p 188)). Since
colonies only stayed in the transitional state for six years on average, there is little informational content in that period
and I focus on the first constitutional change.
16
For two colonies, I report an even earlier date: Jamaica and Montserrat actually changed the rules governing their
franchise to limit political competition. In both cases, this led to active resistance which still culminated in the abolition
of their parliaments. Since limiting the franchise had the same objective as dismantling parliament, I use the dates of
the change in franchise rules in those two cases, which preceded the regime switch by a few years. Jamaica switched to
Crown rule in 1865 and Montserrat in 1863.
7
Figure 1: Constitutional Change and Electoral Turnover
Of the 14 Caribbean colonies that originally had the Assembly system, Bermuda, Bahamas and
Barbados never transitioned out of it. A feature that stands out in Table 1 is that in Bermuda and
the Bahamas, the white share of the population at the time of Abolition was a lot bigger and the
share of sugar in exports a lot smaller than in the other colonies. At that point, Bermuda and the
Bahamas were already fundamentally different in that they were not true slave and plantation
societies.17 With a white majority of the population, the gradual enfranchisement of the former
slaves did not much impact the political equilibrium in those two colonies very much (Lewis (2004,
ch.4)).18 Since the appeal of focusing on the Caribbean lies in the homogeneity of the sample, I
exclude these two colonies from the empirical analysis. The three late colonies that were founded
under Crown rule are listed for completeness but can by definition not play a role in the empirics.
Figure 1 plots the raw electoral turnover data leading up to constitutional changes for the 12
colonies that are actually used in the empirics. It clearly suggests that electoral turnover increased
in the years leading up to the switches. In some cases, such as in Dominica and Grenada, regime
17
Both Bermuda and Bahamas had experimented with plantation crop but their soil and climate had proved unsuitable for them.
18
Lewis (2004, p314) refers to the white mercantile elites in Nassau and Hamilton respectively as the “Bay Street
Boys” and the “Forty Thieves”
8
change followed after a sudden increase in electoral turnover. In others, such as Honduras or
the Virgin Islands, regime change followed a more gradual increase. There were also substantial
differences in baseline electoral turnover: In Barbados, the only colony in the sample that never
transitioned, electoral turnover was always below 40%. By contrast, in the VIrgin Islands, the first
colony to abolish its parliament, electoral turnover was above 40% in every election.
3.2
Data Sources
The main data source for this paper are the British Colonial Blue Books, annual statistical accounts
that were sent to London from each individual colony to report on local conditions. Prior to the
1890s, only two copies exist of each Blue Book, one in the issuing colony’s archives and one in
the British National Archives in London, where this data was hand-collected. From 1836, the Blue
Books’ section Councils and Assemblies reported the names of all local politicians, with election
dates and the parish they represented. From 1854, the Blue Books’ section Political Franchise also
reported the number of registered voters for the last election by parish. Also from 1836, the section Comparative Tables of Revenue and Expenditure, reported detailed breakdowns of taxation and
spending by category, though not by parish. Figure 3 in the data-appendix shows an example of
the Councils and Assemblies section for Barbados in 1847.
3.3
Measuring Political Competition
The number of registered voters is a natural measure of political competition. Unfortunately,
this data only starts in 1854 at the earliest and in some cases as late as 1860. Since the earliest
switch to Crown rule occurs in 1854, the franchise data is too short for empirical analysis in panel
data. Electoral turnover is therefore the preferred measure of political competition since it can be
calculated as early as 1838.19 Electoral turnover is calculated as the share of parliamentary seats
occupied by non-incumbents after each general election, i.e. the variable is bounded between 0
and 1, 0 meaning no turnover at all.
19
The data on politicians starts in 1836.
9
3.4
Data Structure
Since the switch to regime switches were absorbing, the data is naturally set up as duration data:
For each colony the outcome data is therefore set up as a time-series of 0s followed by a single 1 in
the year of the regime change, with which that colony’s data ends.20 For a colony that never transitions, the outcome data is simply a series of 0s. Since an institutional change can occur in any year
between elections, the data is set up as annual data which also allows me to more flexibly control
for time-varying factors that cut across electoral cycles. However, since the measures of political
competition only vary from one election to the next, I cluster standard errors at the electoral-cycle
level within each colony in all specifications. Appendix-Table 1 illustrates the structure of the
annual data for Antigua’s 1853, 1860 and 1867 elections, ending in the regime change.
4
Key Results - The Drivers of Regime Change to Autocracy
4.1
Baseline
To test the main hypothesis that regime switches to autocracy were elites’ defense against political
competition, I regress
CCit = βpolitical competitionit + φt + it ,
(1)
where the dependant CCit takes value 1 in the year when the switch occurs and value 0 in all
years before then. Political competition is measured by electoral turnover and the time-trend φt is
measured in several different ways across specifications. Equation 1 does not include colony fixed
effects because Figure 1 clearly shows that the incidence of the regime switches was determined
by both time-series and cross-sectional variation in electoral turnover.
Table 2 provides the results of estimating specification (1). Column 1 suggests that 10% higher
electoral turnover at the last election is associated with a 1.59% (0.159*0.1) higher probability of
abolishing elected parliament in a given year. Columns 2-5 address the possibility that these results are biased by time-variant forces that correlate with the probability of institutional change
and with the measures of political competition. In column 2 I simply include a common linear
trend. In column 3, I control for a “domino effect,” where institutional change in one colony
20
An additional reason for the duration-data set-up is that data on the regressor, electoral turnover, ends when elected
parliament is abolished.
10
TABLE 2 - Main Results
(1)
(2)
(3)
OLS-Estimates
(4)
(5)
Elect.Turnover
0.159**
(2.144)
0.185**
(2.399)
0.159**
(2.144)
0.180**
(2.388)
0.177**
(2.260)
Observations
R-squared
Controls:
337
0.027
337
0.061
year
337
0.027
337
0.066
D(post-1857)
337
0.036
year-FE
\#(CrownRule)
Note: The data is organized as duration-data, i.e. each colony's time-series is a series of 0s ending in a single 1. 10\% higher electoral
turnover is associated between 1.59\% (0.159*0.1) and 5\% higher probability of abolishing the representative system and switching to
Crown Colony rule in a given year. All s.e. are clustered at the level of a colony's electoral cycle. D(post-1857) proxies for additional
pressure from London for Crown rule after the Indian mutiny.
triggered change in the neighboring colonies, by including the number of already transitioned
colonies.21 Another possibility is that over time, there was differential pressure for more direct
control by the colonial administration. In particular, pressure may have increased after the Indian
Mutiny of 1857 (Burroughs (1999, p 181)).22 In column 4, I control for this with a post-1857 indicator. Finally, in column 5 I flexibly include decade and then year fixed effects. The results appear
overall robust to the inclusion of all these controls.
Since i am studying absorbing regime switches, it is natural to alternatively study the time
elapsed to transition using duration analysis. I report results of a duration analysis in AppendixTable 2.
4.2
IV Results
All controls introduced so far vary in identical ways for all colonies over time. They can therefore
capture common but not colony-specific time trends as a source of bias. I therefore also pursue an
IV strategy that utilizes the exogenous imposition of legislation that greatly facilitating the transfer
of land and which qualitative accounts suggest dramatically increased the sale of estates (Lowes
(1994)). The legislation I consider is the Incumbered Estate Act (IEA), which was introduced into
the Caribbean in 1854.23 Since Abolition, the greatly increased labor costs had bankrupted many
21
Such a network effect could signify learning, a realization that abolishing parliament was a viable option.
Since the Crown could impose Abolition on the Caribbean colonies, it is reasonable to ask why it could not impose
Crown rule. The historical record suggests it was simply not important enough and that the demonstrated willingness
of Caribbean Assemblies to bring the local political process to a halt made colonial administrators unwilling to force
Crown rule onto the Caribbean colonies (Wrong (1923)).
23
The IEA had to be adopted by local acts, the timing of which varied from 1856 to 1867. Since this differential timing
is endogenous, I use only the variation of the general introduction of the Act interacted with initial conditions.
22
11
plantations. Before 1854, a bankrupt plantation’s debt was inseparable from its owner’s other
assets. If an estate was worth 20,000 pounds but indebted to the amount of 30,000, it’s owner still
had to cover the remainder after the estates’s sale. This system stalled the sale of many bankrupt
estates that were out of operation but whose land remained unoccupied. The IEA resolved this
bottleneck because it cleared owners of any remaining liabilities after selling an incumbered estate.
This common time-break is interacted with two dimensions of cross-sectional differences in
initial (1836) conditions that determined the general ability of freedmen to obtain land. The first
was density. The importance of density can be seen in Barbados. Barbados was the only one
of the twelve colonies under study that did not abolish its parliament. Barbados also had the
lowest average electoral turnover of all colonies. The key reason for Barbados’ political stability
seems to have been that it was more than twice as dense as the next densest colony, Antigua.High
density meant There simply was no land available.24 To some degree, density may be a proxy
for soil productivity. However, there much variation in productivity that was not captured by
density because density was also determined by the even distribution of relatively fertile land
everywhere. For example, agricultural land in Antigua was very productive but Antigua also had
very unproductive land in its rugged interior. It was therefore difficult to obtain productive land
in Antigua although it’s density was only half of that in Barbados. I therefore also include a direct
proxy of plantations’ productivity. I use the average price of agricultural slaves in 1936 as a second
source of cross-sectional variation.25 Both variables are reported in Table 2. The two instruments
are D(IEA) · 1836-density and D(IEA) · 1836-slaveprice, while D(IEA) is treated as an additional
non-excludable control.
Table 3 shows the results of instrumenting electoral turnover, incrementally introducing the
same controls as in Table 2. The IV estimates are significant across all specifications and overidentification tests are passed, suggesting that there is indeed a causal impact of political competition on the abolition of parliament. The other noteworthy feature is that IV estimates are about
twice as large as the OLS. Not surprisingly, the Hausman test statistics cannot reject endogeneity.
This suggests that the OLS estimates are in fact downward biased. A likely interpretation of this
24
Another, more subtle, reason was that labor was cheaper in denser places which maintained plantations’ profitability and meant that fewer planters sold their land. This channel is explored in detail in Dippel et al. (2013).
25
This data comes from the tables that determined the compensation that London paid to Caribbean plantation owners after Abolition. These are listed in Martin (1839).
12
TABLE 3 - IV Results
Elect.Turnover
Weak-Instrument F-test
p(Over-Identification Test)
p(Hausman Endogeneity Test)
(1)
(2)
(3)
IV-Estimates
(4)
(5)
0.415**
(2.213)
0.552**
(2.218)
0.415**
(2.213)
0.456**
(2.212)
0.503**
(2.019)
11.44
0.507
0.0886
6.413
0.471
0.0341
11.44
0.507
0.0886
10.72
0.473
0.0676
11.98
0.317
0.0773
Note: Columns 1-5 incrementally introduce the same controls as in the OLS results. In the IV, 10\% higher electoral turnover is
associated with around 4\% (0.415*0.1) higher probability of abolishing the representative system and switching to Crown Colony
rule in a given year. All s.e. are clustered at the level of a colony's electoral cycle. The instruments are D(IEA)*1836-density and
D(IEA)*1836-slaveprice. The indicator D(IEA) is an additional control in the IV estimates and is not an excludable instrument.
TABLE 4 - Reduced Form and First Stage
(1)
(2)
(3)
Reduced Form, y = D(CC)
(4)
(5)
0.154**
(2.112)
-0.047**
(-2.293)
-0.001
(-0.977)
0.128*
(1.828)
-0.071**
(-2.378)
-0.002
(-1.294)
0.158**
(2.130)
-0.077**
(-2.120)
-0.002
(-1.453)
0.118*
(1.679)
-0.053**
(-2.346)
-0.001
(-1.109)
0.208**
(2.095)
-0.062**
(-2.032)
-0.002
(-1.551)
337
0.052
337
0.068
337
0.077
337
0.061
337
0.242
Panel A:
D(IEA) D(IEA)*1836-­‐density
D(IEA)*1836-­‐slaveprice
Observations
R-squared
First Stage, y = Elect.Turnover
Panel B:
D(IEA) D(IEA)*1836-­‐density
D(IEA)*1836-­‐slaveprice
Observations
R-squared
0.093
(1.304)
-0.108***
(-4.782)
-0.001
(-0.661)
0.077
(1.164)
-0.123***
(-3.548)
-0.001
(-0.833)
0.094
(1.288)
-0.113***
(-2.821)
-0.001
(-0.659)
0.083
(1.230)
-0.110***
(-4.606)
-0.001
(-0.689)
0.332***
(2.996)
-0.121***
(-4.868)
-0.001
(-1.049)
337
0.116
337
0.122
337
0.116
337
0.117
337
0.223
Note: Columns 1-5 incrementally introduce the same controls as in the OLS results. In the IV, 10\% higher electoral turnover is
associated with around 4\% (0.415*0.1) higher probability of abolishing the representative system and switching to Crown Colony
rule in a given year. All s.e. are clustered at the level of a colony's electoral cycle. The instruments are D(IEA)*1836-density and
D(IEA)*1836-slaveprice. The indicator D(IEA) is an additional control in the IV estimates and is not an excludable instrument.
is that electoral turnover is a noisy measure of political competition so that the OLS likely suffers from attenuation bias. The magnitude of the IV estimates still appears reasonable, suggesting
that 10% higher electoral turnover, when driven by the instruments, increased the likelihood of
abolishing parliament by 5% in any given year.
Table 4 Panels A and B consider the reduced form and first stage relationships, each with the
same set of additional controls as columns 1-5 in Table 2. These relationships are sign-consistent
and quite strong. The introduction of the IEA increased both electoral turnover and the probability
of a regime switch but did so less where conditions made land transfers more difficult.
13
4.3
Additional Evidence
Table 5 uses data on the franchise at the parish level to provide additional evidence for the core
hypothesis that political competition caused the switches away from democracy. In principle,
the franchise, i.e. the number of registered voters, would be an attractive measure of political
competition. Unfortunately, the Blue Books do not report the franchise before 1854, i.e. too close to
the instance of the regime changes. Correspondingly, using the franchise as a measure of political
competition in estimating equation (1) shows a sign-consistent but weak relationship in Table 5,
column 1. For electoral turnover to be a good measure of political competition it should increase
in the franchise. Table 5, column 2 shows this is the case. However, the relationship is again weak
because of the sparsity of franchise data at the colony level.
I address this issue by relating electoral turnover to the number of registered voters at the
parish-level, where the shorter time-series is less of an issue since the cross-sectional sample size
increases to over 100 and I can focus on within-colony and within-electoral cycle variation across
parishes. The following regression is run with parish data
electoral turnoverip,el−cycle = γlog(reg. voters)ip,el−cycle + ϕip + φel−cycle + ipt ,
(2)
where φel−cycle are colony-specific electoral cycle fixed effects and ϕip are fixed effects for parish p
in colony i. Columns 3 and 4 in Table 5 show that an expanding franchise significantly increased
electoral turnover, even in specifications with colony-specific electoral-cycle fixed effects, parishfixed effects and two-way clustered standard errors, clustered at the electoral-cycle and the parish
level.
While I view the parish results as lending strong support to electoral turnover as a measure of
political competition, there is one more data-source from which evidence can be gleaned on this.
Roby (1831) compiled a complete history of all elected local politicians in Jamaica going back to
the 1600s. With this data-source, I can calculate the entry of political newcomers, ie politicians
whose surnames had never appeared before for Jamaica.26 Reassuringly, the relationship between
the number of political newcomers and the measure of electoral turnover is very tight, as shown in
26
Calculating this requires a long history of elected politicians. Without that, a constant rate of electoral turnover
would mechanically show up as a much higher share of political newcomers in the early years of the data.
14
TABLE 5
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Elect.Turnover
Dependent:
D(CC)
log(reg. voters/population)
0.099*
(1.668)
0.051
(0.977)
0.098***
(3.666)
0.091**
(2.102)
colony-year
colony-year
parish-year
parish
parish-year
parish \&
elect.l cycle
166
0.104
166
0.361
1,363
0.459
1,363
0.548
Unit of observation
fixed effects:
Observations
R-squared
Note: N = 166 because franchise data started to be collected only in 1854. Columns 3‐4 therefore relate the relationship between Electoral turnover and the franchise at the parish level. Column 3 identfiies off within‐parish over time variation, while column 4 adds electoral‐cycle fixed effects to that. In columns 1‐2, s.e. are clustered at the colony‐electoral‐cycle level as before. In columns 3‐4, s.e. are two‐way clustered at the parish and the colony‐
electoral cycle level.
Figure 4 in the data-appendix. This provides further credence to electoral turnover as a measure
of political competition.
4.4
4.4.1
Discussion
Alternative Responses
Why did the Caribbean planters not pursue other options to limit political competition, in particular changes in franchise rules like those adopted in the US South.27 They tried this to some
extent: Craton (1997, p 392) argues that “there were organized efforts to evict peasants from the
land throughout the Caribbean” and McLewin (1987, p 189) argues that “Assemblies brought into
law an umbrella of coercive acts with the purpose of creating a landless peasantry.”28 There is also
some evidence of electoral engineering: Holt (1991) recounts how in Jamaica “In 1844, governor Elgin called for early elections to blunt the registration drive. Yet, when the new assemblymen convened, there were five new colored faces among them.”29 In the end, however, Caribbean planters
27
See Kousser (1999) for a discussion of disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction US South.
As examples, “crown land was priced to encourage labor for wages and was chiefly in remote locations and of poor
quality” (Bolland (1981)) and “parochial land taxes pressed hard on small proprietors” (McLewin (1987, p 184)).
29
To the extent that such efforts at election-timing were successful, measured electoral competition will underestimate
true political competition.
28
15
were very constrained in the use of both overt coercion and coercive legislation. For one, they did
not have the sort of influence in London that Southern planters enjoyed in Washington. The colonial office was much more influenced by abolitionists in London than by Caribbean planters. As
a result, the Crown would overrule discriminatory local Acts with so-called “orders-in-council”
(Craig-James (2000, p 65)).30 In addition, local coercive capacity of planters low, primarily because
their numbers were low. While In the US South, a “black county” may have been 50% black, all of
the Caribbean plantation colonies were more than 90% black. The Caribbean therefore lacked the
white manpower for an equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan.
4.4.2
The Role of the Freedmen
The historical record suggests that black political leaders were aware that the regime switch would
stunt their political influence.31 Then why did the freedmen accept the regime switch? One possibility is that they simply could not prevent it.32 Another is that the freedmen’s leaders were at
least in part bought off with administrative positions (Honychurch (1995)). However, freedmen
appeared to also have genuinely positive expectations of Crown rule. While resistance to oppression was common, often leading to rioting, the switch to Crown rule did not trigger any reported
unrest (Morrell and Parker (1969, p 396), Dookhan (1977, p 114)).33 A positive view of Crown rule
was reasonable given that the Crown had imposed Abolition and given that the three Caribbean
colonies that had always been governed under Crown colony rule were perceived as being run
more in the interests of the freedmen.34
5
Additional Evidence
This Section provides three pieces of additional evidence to corroborate the interpretation of the
main results in Section 4. First, if freedmen’s political threat was enough to cause a pre-emptive
30
Lowes (1994, ch. 5) writes that “because of pressures from the Colonial Office, a comfortable translation of preemancipation legal distinctions into distinctions of skin color was not possible.”
31
Hall (1959, p 262) quotes a black Assemblyman in Jamaica: “You and I have been equals, but what will be the
respective position of our children? Yours will hardly speak to mine.”
32
The Crown had shown in the 1857 Indian mutiny that local uprising would not be tolerated (Burroughs (1999)).
33
The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion was caused by the imprisonment of squatters on an abandoned plantation. It led
directly to Jamaica’s switch to Crown Colony rule, which actually calmed the unrest (Dookhan (1977, p 65)).
34
Laurence (1971, p. 53) writes that “conditions were much better there, as planters never enjoyed the same influence
over local government”.
16
regime switch, then freedmen should have had real political influence before. To test this, I look
for an clear electoral cycle in public spending before the dismantling of parliaments. Second, I
compare public expenditures before and after the regime switch to see whether the regime switch
tilted public spending in elites’ favor in the long run effect. Third, I check directly for preferential
elite access to the colonial administration after the regime switch by investigating the identity of
appointed legislators under Crown rule.
5.1
Electoral Cycles as Evidence of Political Competition
If political competition from freedmen was real, then we should expect politicians to have catered
to freedmen in election years, leading to electoral cycles (Besley and Case (1995)). The historical
record suggests that the interests of the freedmen and the elite were conflicting on several dimensions including taxation sources, land redistribution and public spending. I focus on public
spending for which there is the best data. The families of the Caribbean great planters frequently
lived permanently in England, their children were educated there, and the planters themselves
often left the running of plantations and the representation of their interests in the Assemblies to
their local attorneys if possible (Lowes (1994)). Planters were therefore generally disinterested in
the provision of local public goods and the building of local state capacity. The main conflict with
freedmen was on education and sanitation, which to the planters were either irrelevant or could
be provided privately (Lowes (1994)). I therefore look for evidence of increased spending on education and sanitation in years when politicians had re-election concerns. Specifically, I estimate
Policiesit = βD(election-year)it + γXit + φel−cycle + it ,
(3)
where φel−cycle is a fixed effect for an electoral cycle in a colony so that the effect of an election
year is identified only relative to other years in the same electoral cycle.35 Table 6 reports the
results of this regression. Columns 1-3 report on educational expenditure and columns 4-6 on
expenditure for sanitation and health provision. The first column includes only colony-electoralcycle fixed effects, i.e. each electoral cycle is colony-specific. The second column also controls
for more high-frequency variation in total expenditure. The third column also adds decade fixed
35
colony fixed effects would nest these electoral cycle fixed effects.
17
TABLE 6 -­‐ Electoral Cycle
(1)
(2)
(3)
log(educational expenditure)
D(electoral year)
0.200**
(2.283)
log(total exp)
0.184**
(2.263)
0.830**
(2.447)
Fixed Effects
Observations
R-squared
(4)
(5)
(6)
log(sanitation \& health expenditure)
0.174**
(2.057)
0.675*
(1.864)
0.224**
(2.617)
0.210**
(2.470)
0.387*
(1.802)
decade
0.180**
(1.992)
0.288
(1.301)
decade
172
172
172
243
243
243
0.054
0.157
0.11
0.063
0.097
0.062
Note: All specifications include colony-­‐electoral-­‐cycle fixed effects so that the election-­‐year effect is identififed relative to the rest of the electoral cycle. Reported regresssions use only the data before the switch since there are no elections after. D(electoral year) equals 1 only in the year before the election. The number of observations is less than for the regressions relating institutional change to politcial competition because the Tables of Revenue and Expenditure did not report fine categories in the early years.
effects to further controls for any broad shifts in public spending. There is consistent evidence for
the existence of an electoral cycle on both policy dimensions. This suggests that the political aims
of the freedmen could not be ignored in the post-Abolition period.
5.2
The Consequences of the Regime Change
Next, I investigate the consequences of abolishing parliament. Specifically, I regress
Policiesit = βCrown Ruleit + γXit + φt + θi + it
(4)
where Crown Ruleit is an indicator for Crown rule. I model the counter-factual time-trends φt
with either year fixed effects or colony-specific linear trends in addition to year fixed effects. I
also include time-colony-variant controls Xit and colony fixed effects θi . The policy-outcomes I
consider are again educational expenditure and expenditure on sanitation and other health-related
public goods. The endogeneity of the abolition of elected parliament raises the question when it
should have begun to have an effect. On the one hand, regime change may have been pre-ceded
by a strengthening of elites. On the other hand, elites may have strategically delayed utilizing the
regime change in order to stabilize the new system. My approach is to run separate regressions
not only on an indicator for when Crown rule actually started, i.e. Crown Ruleit = D(Year > Year
of Inst. Change - 1), but also alternatively for indicators that move the date forward or backward
in time. The idea is that the “’true switch” may have have occurred earlier (if elites mobilized
18
TABLE 7 -­‐ The Consequences of Dismantling Parliament
(1)
(2)
log(educational expenditure)
Panel A:
(3)
(4)
log(sanitation \& health expenditure)
Each Cell a Separate Regression
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 2)
-­‐0.297
(1.713)
-­‐0.129
(0.788)
-­‐0.22
(1.433)
-­‐0.24
(1.363)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 1)
-­‐0.369*
(2.156)
-­‐0.223
(1.274)
-­‐0.245
(1.617)
-­‐0.248
(1.551)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change)
-­‐0.398**
(2.374)
-­‐0.273
(1.507)
-­‐0.306*
(1.983)
-­‐0.323*
(1.941)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change + 1)
-­‐0.449**
(2.540)
-­‐0.392*
(1.818)
-­‐0.315**
(2.322)
-­‐0.313**
(2.484)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change + 2)
-­‐0.572**
(3.077)
-­‐0.657**
(2.619)
-­‐0.382**
(2.576)
-­‐0.425**
(2.647)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change + 3)
-­‐0.479**
(2.633)
-­‐0.484*
(2.118)
-­‐0.306**
(2.820)
-­‐0.279**
(2.553)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change + 4)
-­‐0.346*
(1.828)
-­‐0.253
(1.111)
-­‐0.268**
(2.367)
-­‐0.208
(1.731)
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change + 5)
-­‐0.264
(1.298)
-­‐0.139
(0.608)
-­‐0.189
(1.445)
-­‐0.082
(0.601)
Panel B:
D(Year > Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 1)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 3)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 2)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 1)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change + 1)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change + 2)
D(Year = Year of Inst. Change + 3)
Controls:
Each Columns = One Regression
-­‐0.515**
(2.943)
-­‐0.104
(1.352)
0.241*
(1.931)
0.560***
(3.733)
0.371
(1.223)
0.825**
(3.045)
0.328
(1.587)
-­‐0.097
(0.469)
-­‐0.513**
(2.381)
-­‐0.036
(0.371)
0.277
(1.651)
0.582**
(2.712)
0.566*
(1.974)
0.916**
(2.816)
0.332
(1.748)
-­‐0.097
(0.463)
-­‐0.353**
(2.260)
-­‐0.139
(0.693)
0.185
(0.955)
0.248
(1.367)
0.416
(1.783)
0.291
(1.451)
-­‐0.063
(0.602)
0.182
(1.480)
-­‐0.379**
(2.221)
-­‐0.203
(1.043)
0.101
(0.530)
0.214
(0.993)
0.39
(1.577)
0.206
(0.988)
-­‐0.124
(1.172)
0.117
(0.836)
year-­‐FE
year-­‐FE \&
col.-­‐spec. trend
year-­‐FE
year-­‐FE \&
col.-­‐spec. trend
Observations
494
494
509
509
R-­‐squared
0.948
0.955
0.921
0.934
Note: In Panel A, each cell reports the coefficient and t-­‐statistic for a separate regression where, along rows, the time of transition is varied around the true transition-­‐year. For example, the variable "D(Year > Year of Inst. Change -­‐ 1)" turns to 1 in the year of the switch. Panel A shows that the most significant effect is estimated if the "true switch" is considered to have happend 2-­‐3 after the actual switch. Panel B explores the underlying reason by adding dummies for each year around the regime switch. (Each of these additonal dummies = 1 in only one year for each colony.) Panel B shows that in the two years before and after the regime switch, there were systematically higher expenditures on public goods. This explains why the strongest effects in Panel A are estimated when the "true switch" is assumed to occur with some lag. In both panels, all regressions include colony fixed effects. Columns 1 and 3 have year fixed effects and columns 2 and 4 add colony-­‐specific linear trends. The data for the Tables of Revenue and Expenditure runs from 1838 to 1900 for both variables. However, in early years, education expenditure was often not separately reported so that N varies for the two outcomes.
19
leading up to the regime change) or later (if elites deliberately held off on utilizing the de jure
rule change). The indicator D(Year > Year of Inst. Change - 1) turns to 1 in the year of the switch
while the indicator D(Year > Year of Inst. Change) does so a year later. Since these indicators
are too highly correlated to be included in the same regression, my approach is to run a separate
regression for each.
Table 7 Panel A reports the results of estimating equation (4), moving the date of the true
switch around the date of the de jure switch. Each cell in Panel A reports the coefficient and tstatistic for a separate regression where, along rows, the time of transition is varied around the
true transition-year. Across columns, the outcome is varied as well the modeling of the counterfactual time trend. Panel A shows that the most significant effect is estimated if the true switch is
considered to have happened 2-3 years after the de jure switch. Panel B explores the underlying
reason by including dummies for each of the sevens years around the regime switch in addition to
the indicator D(Year > Year of Inst. Change - 1). Panel B shows that in the year before the switch
and the first two years of the new regime, there were systematically higher expenditures on public
goods. This is consistent with the idea that elites initially delayed utilizing the new regime and
it explains why the strongest effects in Panel A are estimated when the ”true switch” is assumed
to occur with some lag. The patterns are much stronger for educational expenditure but also
present for other public good expenditure. This makes sense since educational expenditure was
arguably even less in the interest of elites. While there were some positive externalities to be head
from better health provision to everyone even if health was a private good to elites, the opposite
was true for education. An obedient and stable workforce was key for the profitability of elites’
plantations in the Caribbean (Dippel et al. (2013)) and higher education would have raised the
outside option of plantation workers (?).
Overall, the estimates therefore consistently suggest that Crown rule actually helped the elites.
The timing of the estimates indicates that elites may have strategically delayed utilizing the institutional change in their favor in order to first stabilize the new system. In terms of magnitude, the
estimates seem reasonable in light of the estimates in Table 6. The permanent effect of abolishing
parliament appears to have reduced educational expenditure by about 50% while the estimates in
Table 6 suggest that it increased by about 15% to 20% in an election year. Abolishing parliament
reduced expenditure for other public goods by about 30% while the estimates in Table 6 suggest
20
that it increased by about 20% in an election year.36
5.3
Direct Evidence for Elite Persistence
A possible explanation for the findings in Table 7 is that the switch to Crown rule shielded elites
from popular pressure but in fact preserved their insider access to the colonial administration.
Since elites’ access would have depended on them actually staffing critical administrative positions, I look for direct evidence of this in the data of appointed legislators under Crown rule.
Based on last name, I linking all individuals into families and calculate the share of appointed
legislators whose families ever held elected office under the old Assembly system.37 I pool all
appointed legislators into a common appointed legislature defined by event time, i.e. year 1 pools
the eleven legislatures after each one’s switch to Crown rule. I then calculate the share of legislators whose family ever held elected office under the old Assembly system.38
Table 8 shows that this share is very high and very stable over time. 21 years after parliaments
were abolished, almost 90% of the appointed positions continued to be be give to locals whose
families had at one time held elected office in their colony. This measure has the shortcoming that
I cannot distinguish between elites’ last names and the last names of politicians who represented
freedmen. While it displays a high degree of persistence, it is therefore not clear whether this
persistence differentially favored the planter elites. To better gauge this, I also calculate a measure
of the degree to which appointed legislators represented the plantation economy. I take the 1834
slave-density of each parish from Higman (1995) and calculate an appointed chamber’s implicit
“slave-density.” I average over all parishes that a family had represented in elected parliament a
family’s implied “slave-density.” I normalize this measure by a colony’s total slave density to create a measure of relative slave density that is comparable across colonies. Averaging this measure
over all appointed legislators across colonies gives a sense of the relative dominance of plantation
interests. If this number is larger than 1 on average, then plantation districts are systematically
over-represented. Table 8 shows that this measure remains very stable at around 2.5 over the next
36
Obviously, if expenditure on public goods shrank as a relative share of total expenditure, some other positions must
have increased. Consistent with rent-extraction by elites, I found some evidence that salaries for the civil administrators
increased but this evidence was very weak.
37
Under Crown rule, legislative chambers were appointed by the governor. Legislators’ names and appointment
dates continued to be reported in the Blue Books.
38
A family is specific to a colony in this calculation.
21
TABLE 8 -­‐ Elite Persistence
Years Since Switch to Crown Rule:
3
6
9
12
18
21
Share Appointees from Elected Families:
87.04
88.33
91.23
91.04
90.32
86.67
Slave-­‐Density of Appointee's Former Elective Parishes
(relative to equal representation)
3.19
2.66
2.55
2.56
2.64
2.53
Note: This table reports two measures of persistence, in 3-­‐year steps after the switch to Crown rule. Both measures are calculated by pooling all appointed legislators after the switch to Crown rule into one legislature and calculating shares so that all appointed legislators of all 11 colonies are represented in each year. ``Appointed legislators from Elected Families" are those whose family had held an Assembly seat at any time before a colony's abolition of its Assembly. To construct the second measure, each parish in each colony is associated with a slave-­‐density (#slaves/area) in 1836, relative to the colony-­‐average. This proxies for the dominance of the plantation-­‐system in that parish, relative to the colony average, making it comparable across colonies. The table reports the average of this relative slave-­‐density across all appointed legislatures.
two decades after parliaments were abolished.
6
6.1
Discussion
Political Pressure after the Regime Switch
Given the evidence presented in Table 7 and 8, why did freedmen not mobilize against Crown
rule once it failed to generate favorable outcomes for them? One answer is provided by the social
science literature on mobilization and the coordination of beliefs (Schelling (1980), Acemoglu and
Jackson (2011)): Because slavery had been specifically designed to undermine such coordination,
post-Abolition freedmen did not have many social ties that reached past the individual plantation,
making mobilization difficult (Chay and Munshi (2011)). While this obstacle may have been overcome in the face of overt oppression, the mere absence of positive change may not have provided
the necessary impetus required for mobilization (Hacker and Pierson (2011)). As well, uprising
are costly and the reductions in public good provision indicated in Table 7 may not have been
sufficient to justify this cost.
6.2
The Role of the Crown
Before the regime switches, planters expressed concern that the Crown would side with the interests of the freedmen by spending on public works and in particular on sanitation and education
(Will (1970, p 289), Dookhan (1977, p 70-71, 80)). This was echoed in the Crown’s stated intentions
to improve local public goods and to develop an independent smallholder society (Wrong (1923,
22
p. 78-79); Burroughs (1999, p. 172-173)).39 Yet, Table 7 shows that the regime switches had the
opposite effect. What explains this? One possibility is that the Crown’s true aims were different
from its stated aims. Instead, the colonial office in London may have simply over-estimated its
ability to effect local change: Lewis (2004, p. 104) writes of the governors’ incentives: “To join
with local white society meant a pleasant tour of duty, to fight them meant political conflict and
social ostracism. Inevitably, the governor passed smoothly into the union, political and social, of
government and vested interests.”
6.3
Implications for the Colonial Origins Literature
Several seminal papers in the empirical institutions literature have argued that low population
densities, low settler mortality and a geography suitable for smallholding crops meant that Europeans set up inclusive institutions in the settler colonies of Australasia and North America, while
the opposite conditions meant that they set up extractive institutions in plantation colonies such
as those in the Caribbean (Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002), Engerman and Sokoloff (2002)). The data
on initial conditions and present-day institutional and economic development clearly support this
argument: Plotting present-day incomes against initial conditions, Figure 2 shows the relationship
between initial conditions and present-day incomes for the former British settler colonies and the
Caribbean colonies in the core samples of Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002).
However, the data explored in this paper highlights that there was substantial within-colony
over time variation in colonial institutions centuries after initial settlement. In fact, as late as 1832,
the year in which the Reform Act extended the franchise to the poor in England, the plantation
colonies in the British Caribbean appeared considerably more inclusive than the settler colonies
in Australasia and North America. In that year, only five of the eleven British settler colonies
had elected parliaments whereas 14 of the 17 Caribbean colonies had them. The reasons were
historical: By contrast, the settler colonies of Australasia were settled much later, when the colonial
government had asserted more direct control, and by convicts, which initially had no voice in the
running of their colonies (Burroughs (1999)). Table 9 shows that, as a result, in 1832, having a
form of local democracy actually correlated positively with the intensity of slavery and negatively
39
Henry Taylor, the colonial office’s supervisor of West Indian affairs, publicly chastised the Assemblies for being
“eminently disqualified for the great task of educating and improving a people newly born to freedom” (Wrong (1923)).
23
Figure 2: 1995 GDPp.c. and initial conditions in AJR 2001 and 2002
with the distance to the equator, two variables that commonly correlate in the opposite way with
good institutions. Half a century later, these correlations had reversed. All eleven settler colonies
had obtained elected parliaments while the majority of Caribbean colonies had abolished theirs
(Wight (1952)).
These data patterns suggest that initial conditions shaped later institutional and economic development beyond the institutions that settlers set up initially. This is important because it could
mean that initial conditions may not be an excludable instrument for institutions. However, this
really is a statement only about de jure institutions. De facto, the democratic institutions in the
Caribbean only served a small elite even and the vast majority of the population enjoyed less representation than in the settler colonies in 1832. When institutions are considered as a bundle of de
jure institutions and the de facto inclusiveness with which they applied, the evidence presented
here does not invalidate the use of initial conditions as an instrument for the post-colonial bundle of later de jure and de facto institutions as in Acemoglu et al. (2001, 2002) who instrument
for the contemporary “protection against expropriation risk” from Political Risk Services and the
24
TABLE 9
(1)
(3)
Repr. Government 1832
Dep:
populations-share slaves (1834)
0.004*
(2.037)
-0.011***
(-8.731)
Distance-to-Equator
Constant
Observations
R-squared
(2)
(4)
Repr. Government 1882
0.468***
(3.496)
-0.391
(-0.648)
0.791***
(4.042)
1.025***
(13.166)
2.791***
(7.927)
-0.302**
(-2.645)
28
0.138
28
0.016
28
0.746
28
0.707
Representative Govt. North American Settler Colonies:
Representative Govt. Australasian Settler Colonies:
Representative Govt. Caribbean:
5/6
0/5
14/17
6/6
5/5
3/17
Note: The North American colonies are Lower and Upper Canada, New Brunswick, New Foundland, Novia Scotia, Prince Edward Island.
The Australasian colonies are New Zealand, Tasmania, West Australia, South Australia and New South Wales. The Caribbean colonies
are Antigua, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Barbados, Br. Honduras (Belize), Jamaica, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, the Virgin Islands,
Dominica, Tobago, St. Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, St Lucia and Br. Guyana.
“constraints on the executive” from Polity.
7
Conclusion
This paper presents evidence that elites in non-inclusive democracies may prefer to initiate a
regime change to autocracy rather than losing their political influence as democracy becomes
more representative. Evidence comes from a series of regime changes from democracy to autocracy in the 19th century British Empire. The institutional set-up of the British Empire meant
that the internal initiation of the regime change was openly observable: Local colonial parliaments
could simply abolish themselves and invite the colonial administration to take over the legislative
arm of government. The paper’s key finding is that increasing political competition from freed
slaves after Abolition explains the instance and timing of the abolition of parliaments by the traditional elites . This paper therefore highlights a new mechanism for why democracies may revert
to autocracy, especially when they are not broad-based.
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29
A
DATA-APPENDIX
30
Figure 3: The Blue Books’ Assembly Data (Barbados 1847)
Figure 4: Does Electoral Turnover Measure Political Entry?
31
APPENDIX‐TABLE 1
Colony &
Year
& Crown Rule & Election &
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
Antigua
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
Yes
Yes
Yes
Elect. Turnover
&
log(voters)
0.25
0.25
0.25
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.35
0.35
0.35
0.35
0.35
0.35
0.35
0.43
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
.
.
.
6.109
6.109
6.109
6.109
6.109
6.109
6.109
6.238
6.238
6.238
6.238
6.238
6.238
6.238
6.386
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
&
APPENDIX-­‐TABLE 2 -­‐ Cox Proportional Hazad Model
Specification:
Elect.Turnover
(1)
Main Relation
7.806***
(4.276)
D(IEA)*1836-­‐density
-1.252**
(-2.322)
-0.035**
(-2.146)
D(IEA)*1836-­‐slaveprice
Observations
(2)
Reduced Form Relation
337
337
Note: Column 1 relates the timing of transition to only electoral turnover. The table
reports coefficients and not hazard rates. 10\% higher electoral turnover raises the
number of switches in a given year by 0.78. Column 2 relates the timing of transition to
the instruments D(IEA)*1836-density and D(IEA)*1836-slaveprice as well as (not
reported) the indicator D(IEA). Robust s.e. are used.
32