Political Institutions and Growth Collapses

This paper tests whether Rodrik's (1999) results that institutions for conflict management are associated with the ability to react to economic shocks are robust to different ways of defining the quality of such institutions. In this paper, we measure the quality of conflict management institutions with two different indices. The first is an indexof political constraints on the ability of the executive ti ompise its will. these constrains limit the ability of the government to arbitrarily change the rules of the game and therefore may reduce redistributive struggles. the second index measures the degree of political particularims. We define political particularism as the policymakers' ability to futher thier career by catering to narrow interests rather than broader national plataforms. The indices used in this paper solve the endogenity and subjectivity biases that affect Rodrick's main measure of institutional quality. We find strong support for the idea that high levels of political constrains and intermediate levels of political particaularism are associated with a qquick recovery from economic shocks.