Assessing the Relationship between Theocratic Authoritarianism and Economic Institutional Quality in Iran
| Název práce v češtině: | Hodnocení vztahu mezi teokratickým autoritářstvím a kvalitou ekonomických institucí v Íránu |
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| Název v anglickém jazyce: | Assessing the Relationship between Theocratic Authoritarianism and Economic Institutional Quality in Iran |
| Klíčová slova: | politické instituce, autoritářství, teokracie, Írán, ekonomické instituce |
| Klíčová slova anglicky: | political institutions, authoritarianism, theocracy, Iran, economic institutions |
| Akademický rok vypsání: | 2023/2024 |
| Typ práce: | bakalářská práce |
| Jazyk práce: | angličtina |
| Ústav: | Katedra politologie (23-KP) |
| Vedoucí / školitel: | Pelin Ayan Musil, Ph.D. |
| Řešitel: | skrytý - zadáno vedoucím/školitelem |
| Datum přihlášení: | 27.12.2023 |
| Datum zadání: | 27.12.2023 |
| Zásady pro vypracování |
| The thesis will look at the relationship between X and Y
X = The effect of an authoritarian/theocratic form of governance Y = Economic institutions For X, the thesis will use mostly the adjusted version following data sets to show the political and freedom stance of Iran: • Civil Liberties index & Political Rights from Freedom House, • Rule of Law Index from World Justice Project, • Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, • World Governance Indicators from World Bank, • Global Restrictions on Religion from Pew Research Center, • Freedom of Thought from World Bank, • Democracy Index from Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), • Some other variables from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) & Polity IV, For Y, the plan is to use mostly the adjusted version following data sets to show the economic institution quality of Iran: • World Economic Freedom Index from The Fraser Institute • Economic Freedom Index from The Heritage Foundation For the set of controls (Z), the plan is to use the following variables from the following checks: • GDP growth and nightlight analysis done by Henderson et al (2012), Beyer et al. (2022) , Martinez (2018), and Fouladgar et al. (2023) The project is inspired by these papers from the epic syllabus: • Acemoglu et al. (2005), • Kotschy & Sunde (2017), It will use OLS more or less to demonstrate the relationship between authoritarian view and economic institution in form of final regression data. |
| Seznam odborné literatury |
| Acemoglu, Daron. “Why Not a Political Coase Theorem? Social Conflict, Commitment, and Politics.” Journal of Comparative Economics 31, no. 4 (December 2003): 620–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2003.09.003.
Acemoglu, Daron, Suresh Naidu, Pascual Restrepo, and James A. Robinson. “Democracy Does Cause Growth.” SSRN Electronic Journal 127, no. 1 (2014). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2411791. Alesina, Alberto, and Paola Giuliano. “Culture and Institutions.” Journal of Economic Literature 53, no. (2014): 898–944. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.53.4.898 Beck, Thorsten, and Luc Laeven. “Institution Building and Growth in Transition Economies.” Journal of Economic Growth 11, no. 2 (June 2006): 157–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-006-9000-0. Beyer, Robert, Jiaxiong Yao, and Yingyao Hu. “Measuring Quarterly Economic Growth from Outer Space.” IMF Working Papers 2022, no. 109 (June 2022): 1. https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400211553.001. Blaydes, Lisa, Amr Hamzawy, and Hesham Sallam, eds. Struggles for Political Change in the Arab World: Regimes, Oppositions, and External Actors after the Spring. Library.oapen.org. University of Michigan Press, (2022). https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58578. Campos, Nauro F, Fabrizio Coricelli, and Marco Frigerio. “DP17551 The Political U: New Evidence on Democracy and Income.” CEPR Discussion Paper, no. 17551 (2022). https://cepr.org/publications/dp17551 Campos, Nauro F., Fabrizio Coricelli, and Luigi Moretti. “Institutional Integration and Economic Growth in Europe.” Journal of Monetary Economics 103 (May 2019): 88–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2018.08.001. Campos, Nauro F, and Jeffrey B. Nugent. “Institutions and Growth: Can Human Capital Be a Link?” CEPAL Review 1998, no. 64 (April 1, 1998): 7–27. https://doi.org/10.18356/d29a5db5-en. Coase, R. H. “The Problem of Social Cost.” The Journal of Law and Economics 3, no. 3 (October 1960): 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/466560. Colagrossi, Marco, Domenico Rossignoli, and Mario A. Maggioni. “Does Democracy Cause Growth? A Meta-Analysis (of 2000 Regressions).” European Journal of Political Economy 61, no. 101824 (November 2019): 101824. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2019.101824. Dahl, Robert A. “What Political Institutions Does Large-Scale Democracy Require?” Political Science Quarterly 120, no. 2 (June 2005): 187–97. Diermeier, Daniel, Georgy Egorov, and Konstantin Sonin. “Political Economy of Redistribution.” Econometrica 85, no. 3 (2017): 851–70. https://doi.org/10.3982/ecta12132. Egorov, Georgy, and Konstantin Sonin. “The Political Economics of Non-Democracy.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3706331. Engelhardt, Andrew M., Stanley Feldman, and Marc J. Hetherington. “Advancing the Measurement of Authoritarianism.” Political Behavior 45 (May 12, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09718-6. Fouladgar, Vahid and Mehdi Feizi. “Estimation of Iran’s seasonal GDP using night light images.” Economics and Regional Development Journal 29, no. 2 (2023): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.22067/erd.2023.77085.1127 Frantz, Erika. “The Politics of Dictatorship : Institutions and Outcomes in Authoritarian Regimes.” Boulder : Lynne Rienner Publishers, (2011). Glaeser, Edward L., Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. “Do Institutions Cause Growth?” Journal of Economic Growth 9, no. 3 (September 2004): 271–303. Hall, Joshua C., Russell S. Sobel, and George R. Crowley. “Institutions, Capital, and Growth.” Southern Economic Journal 77, no. 2 (2010): 385–405. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40997138. Hanson, Jonathan K. “Loyalty and Acquiescence: Authoritarian Regimes and Inequality Outcomes.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2013. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1642485. Henderson, J. Vernon, Adam Storeygard, and David N Weil. “Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space.” American Economic Review 102, no. 2 (April 2012): 994–1028. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.102.2.994. Kazemi, Farhad. “The Precarious Revolution: Unchanging institutions and the fate of reform in Iran: Iranian politics is a system made by the clerics for the clerics, and for their supporters who possess a near monopoly on the spoils of the revolution and the country’s resources.” Journal of International Affairs 57, no. 1 (September 22, 2003): 81. Lachapelle, Jean, Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way, and Adam E. Casey. “Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability—ERRATUM.” World Politics 73, no. 3 (July 2021): 592–92. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0043887121000071. Lipset, Seymour Martin. “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.” The American Political Science Review 53, no. 1 (1959): 69–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/1951731. Marciano, Alain, Alessandro Melcarne, and Giovanni B. Ramello. “The Economic Importance of Judicial Institutions, Their Performance and the Proper Way to Measure Them.” Journal of Institutional Economics 15: 1 (October 11, 2018): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744137418000292. Martinez, Luis R. “How Much Should We Trust the Dictator’s GDP Estimates?” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3093296. Mehrzad Boroujerdi, and Kourosh Rahimkhani. Postrevolutionary Iran: A Political Handbook. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2018. Morid Moshtagh Sefat, Farhad. “Political Economy of Iran: Institutions versus Culture.” etheses.whiterose.ac.uk, March 1, 2016. https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/19564/. Parisi, Francesco. “Political Coase Theorem.” SSRN Electronic Journal 115, no. 1/2 (2003). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.262025. Pejovich, Svetozar. “The Effects of the Interaction of Formal and Informal Institutions on Social Stability and Economic Development.” Journal of Markets & Morality 2, no. 2 (1999). https://www.marketsandmorality.com/index.php/mandm/article/view/624. Persson, Torsten, and Guido Tabellini. “Democracy and Development: The Devil in the Details.” American Economic Review 96, no. 2 (April 2006): 319–24. https://doi.org/10.1257/000282806777212396. Piątek, Dawid, Michał Pilc, and Katarzyna Szarzec. “What Determines the Institutional Change in Transition Economies?” Argumenta Oeconomica 1, no. 42 (2019): 235–72. https://doi.org/10.15611/aoe.2019.1.10. Rivetti, Paola, and Francesco Cavatorta. “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. Global Politics, Protesting and Knowledge Production in The Region And Beyond.” PARTECIPAZIONE E CONFLITTO 14, no. 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v14i2p511. Rivetti, Paola, and Shirin Saeidi. “Political Convergence, Surpluses of Activism, and Genealogy: Examining Iran’s Quasi-Revolutionary Situation.” Iranian Studies 56, no. 3 (July 1, 2023): 563–68. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2023.14. Rodrik, Dani. “Institutions for High-Quality Growth: What They Are and How to Acquire Them.” Studies in Comparative International Development 35, no. 3 (September 2000): 3–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02699764. Volpi, Frédéric, and Johannes Gerschewski. “Crises and Critical Junctures in Authoritarian Regimes: Addressing Uprisings’ Temporalities and Discontinuities.” Third World Quarterly 41, no. 6 (March 18, 2020): 1030–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2020.1729728. Wright, Joseph, and Daehee Bak. “Measuring Autocratic Regime Stability.” Research & Politics 3, no. 1 (February 2016): 205316801562660. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015626606. Yadav, Vineeta. “Authoritarian Institutions and Democratic Lessons.” Political Research Quarterly 76, no. 2 (July 13, 2022): 106591292211102. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221110231. |
| Předběžná náplň práce v anglickém jazyce |
| Institutions, as a matter of study, have become under the spotlight of academic research in the past few years. Their influence over final results has been investigated by scholars, and the institutional role in changes is now widely accepted in academia and is a topic of ongoing research. Institutional quality or measuring the effectiveness of institutions is a way of assessing their function, and various methods have been implemented in recent years. Among analysed institutions, political and economic ones are considered the most crucial in determining a given society’s overall situation. Islamic Republic regime, after taking over power in 1979, Iran tried to implement its interpretation of Shia Islam as the official narrative and legal framework for Iran. Since then, major fundamental changes, including institutional changes, have happened in Iran. Many scholars have tried to investigate these changes in various ways, and academia has been analysing changes in Iran since 1979. However, a missing aspect of these analyses can be seen in the effect of political changes via making Iran a more authoritarian and theocratic country in institutional quality.
This proposal aims to investigate the possible relationship between the political shift in Iran towards theocratic authoritarianism and changes in institutional quality with an emphasis on the quality of economic institutions. The findings of this research may likely help us understand the hidden effect of political changes in institutional quality and pave the way for future research on how to predict or influence the future of economic institutions’ quality in Iran. Nevertheless, there are boundaries in studying the actual effect of authoritarianism and theocracy and the study of institutional quality. Firstly, although plenty of datasets are available to measure the state of democracy, theocracy, and institutions, not all of them cover a long period of data for Iran, thus bringing some practical difficulties in finding the exact relations between them. Secondly, for the available data, there is a degree of misinformation derived from incorrect or manipulated data provided by the official reports. Thirdly, there is little literature aiming at institutional quality in Iran, considering the newest stages of the discipline. However, for these limitations, there are some degrees of response. Technical issues regarding the shortage of data can be solved by using panel data of some group controls, like the entire dataset and Middle Eastern countries, seeing the general trends among them, and comparing it with Iran. To control the possibility of untrustworthy data, we can implement checks and robust measures to estimate the close probabilities of correct results. Finally, because of the lack of related literature about Iran, general academic papers on institutional quality and the influence of authoritarianism and theocracy can be used alongside studies focused on Iranian change in the political and economic situation in recent years and in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Expected Outcomes: This research will provide a multifaceted analysis of potential future scenarios for Iran, considering political, economic, and international dimensions. It will offer valuable insights for policymakers, academics, and observers interested in Iran’s development in a post-Islamic Republic context. Literature Review: Institutional quality and its effect on the outcome of the countries came into scholarship focus due to interest in determining the primary contributing outcome. Acemuglu et al. (2005) introduced the relationship between political institutions and economic outcomes below in their paper on institutions and long-run growth. In search of long-run growth (economic growth), they argue that current political institutions and level of equality are crucial to define political power, and political power in contemporary times will determine existing economic institutions and future economic outcomes. In an earlier paper, Acemuglu (2003a) and Parisi (2003), based on the Coase Theorem (Coase 1960), introduced the Political Coase Theorem, in which they explain that in a perfect situation with the economic institutions, political institutions will determine the outcome of the economy. However, this view is not complete, as later they explain that in imperfect conditions, political institutions will affect economic results by influencing economic institutions. Acemuglu et al. (2005) also explained the possible variables in determining the political institutions. Nauro et al. (2022) discuss a strong relationship between democracy and growth, explaining that democracy can cause higher income in the long term. On the other hand, Persson & Tabellini (2006) and Rodrik (2000) suggest that democracy as a whole cannot determine the growth in outcome and more detail or local factors within democracy should be analysed. However, the majority of papers suggest that regardless of whether it is a democracy or not, the level of political freedom affects economic institutions through different measurements. Yadav (2022) describes that authoritarianism, as a result of political changes and means of institution-making, can alter political institutions and thus influence political status. Moreover, according to Hanson (2013), authoritarianism can affect economic outcomes by adopting certain economic policies centred towards their political view rather than long-term economic growth. Therefore, authoritarianism can influence political and economic institutions, and its study can tell us more about these effects. Iran, after 1979, experienced significant changes in all aspects, including political and economic institutions, caused by the new cleric regime. In a few decades, the Islamic Republic, by maintaining its way of revolutionary government, tried to impose its desires on Iran’s total sphere (Rivetti 2023). Iran, now as a cleric-based autocracy, has been experiencing various changes in political and economic situation since 1979. Depending on the internal and international conditions, Iran has been more prone to fluctuations usually caused not directly by external reasons but via a unique function of institutions that were heavily influenced by the theocratic authoritarianism of the Islamic Regime (Morid Moshtagh Sefat 2016). These institutional changes are the aim of this study. Research question/hypotheses Authoritarian theocracy in Iran has influenced the economic and institutional quality and, as a result, the economic outcome. Whether it is a correlation or causality, this relation is to be investigated. Methodology This research will incorporate both qualitative and limited quantitative methods: 1. Qualitative Methods: Theoretical analysis: Examine current theories and literature alongside existing documents to assess the impact of authoritarian theocracy on institutional quality and economic outcome in Iran and compare it with other countries of the region and the world in general. 2. Quantitative Methods: Authoritarian, theocratic and economic data analysis: Utilise data to assess Iran’s current political and theocratic situation and economic institutional outcome, using data analysis, correlations, regressions and panel data and in comparative view with the Middle East and the World. A time span of selected variables will cover the period of 1950 to 2023, varying based on availability and usability of data. Structure of the thesis Proposed title: Assessing the Relationship between Authoritarian Theocracy and Economic Institutional Quality in Iran The proposed structure of the thesis is the ‘IMRDC’ scheme, which stands for Introduction, Methodology (including theory), Results, and Discussion/Conclusion. Variable and datasets: • Civil Liberties Index & Political Rights from Freedom House, • Rule of Law Index from World Justice Project, • Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International, • World Governance Indicators from World Bank, • Global Restrictions on Religion from Pew Research Center, • Freedom of Thought from World Bank, • Democracy Index from Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), • World Economic Freedom Index from The Fraser Institute • Economic Freedom Index from The Heritage Foundation • Some other variables from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) & Polity IV |