Institutional persistence

What is left of a set of rules after the rules are gone. An office is abolished, a border moves, an empire dissolves, and the trust levels and the habits it produced keep showing up in the population that lived under it, long after the formal institutions have been replaced by identical ones on both sides.

The reading this course takes from it cuts in both directions. It explains why Philippine behaviour still tracks arrangements that were designed centuries ago, which is the whole spine of Level 1. It also sets the honest expectation for anything built now, because a reform is working against a headwind with a date on it. Dated is not eternal. It is simply slow.

Source: Sascha O. Becker, Katrin Boeckh, Christa Hainz and Ludger Woessmann (2016), “The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy,” The Economic Journal, 126(590). Communities on either side of the long-dissolved Habsburg border have shared identical formal institutions for a century, and historical Habsburg affiliation still predicts higher current trust in courts and police and lower bureaucratic corruption, surviving falsification tests using spuriously relocated borders. Free working paper: https://conference.iza.org/DivLMI2010/becker_s506.pdf .

First used in: 2.7 · Can a country change? Somebody already checked