Links I liked

  1. Micro-level conflict data, the map. And other analysis of the HiCN working papers
  2. Arvind Subramanian reviews Why Nations Fail in one graph
  3. Top-tweeting African politicians
  4. Surely xkcd should get an honorary political science PhD for this…

5 Responses

  1. Interesting commentary from Subramanian. The critique of WNF seems to me to both oversimplify Acemoglu & Robinson’s arguments about the interplay between economic development and politics, but also to unreasonably equate a democracy index with the quality of institutions. China has some democracy, if only through demonstrations of popular opinion. It also certainly has some contract enforcement and property rights. Likewise, India’s institutional quality is probably overstated by its high democracy score.