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The Cultural Roots of Institutions

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  • Mariko Klasing

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    Abstract

    Do political institutions have cultural roots? Using a novel data set of cultural values we show that culture, defined as a society's collective beliefs and values, is an important determinant of institutions. We argue that the traditional proxies for culture used in the existing literature suffer from conceptual problems and find that they do not survive several robustness checks. Our results suggest, that individualist societies and societies with preference for a more equal distribution of power set up institutions that better protect individual property rights, place more constraints on governments and have more effective governments. We find that our measures of culture are robust to the inclusion of other control variables and across different samples and that they always dominate the effects of the traditional proxies.

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    File URL: http://www1.vwa.unisg.ch/RePEc/usg/dp2008/DP-24-Kl.pdf
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    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by Department of Economics, University of St. Gallen in its series University of St. Gallen Department of Economics working paper series 2008 with number 2008-24.

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    Length: 36 pages
    Date of creation: Nov 2008
    Date of revision:
    Handle: RePEc:usg:dp2008:2008-24

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    Keywords: Institutions; political institutions; culture; cultural values;

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