The Effect of Executive Constraints on Reform Implementation: An Empirical Analysis

In the political economy literature there is a widely accepted view that checks on the executive can block policy implementation. Dueto lack of sufficient data, there have not been any attempts to find empirical evidence to support this theory. This thesis studies the effect of executive constraints on reform implementation using a new dataset on economic reforms introduced by Giulianoet al. (2013) and Polity IV's measure of constraints on the executive. The database used by Giuliano et al. (2013) describes the degree of regulation in six different sectors of the economy: agriculture, product markets (electricity and telecommunication), trade, capital account, current account and the domestic financial sector in 156 countries for the period 1960-2005. I use two approaches to study the relationship between executive constraints and reform implementation. The first replicates the methodology used by Giuliano et al. (2013) using executive constraints instead of democracy as the variable of interest. The second studies the persistence of the deregulation index to see whether it is affected by executive constraints. If the theory presented before is supported by the evidence, I should observe that high executive constraints are associated with a higher persistence of the deregulation index. Both approaches result in the inability to find statistically significant evidence that constraints on the executive have any effect on reform implementation, as measured by the deregulation index from Giuliano et al. (2013)