From Clio Infrastructure
Institutions
a new hub set up by the Utrecht group in economic history
Given the importance attached to political, social and religious institutions in economic development, a major challenge for the project is to measure institutions historically. Therefore, during the second year of the planning cycle, a conference will be organized on this theme, and leading experts will be invited to suggest new ways, and discuss old ways of measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of institutions.
Anticipating on this, the following set of historical institutions will be included in the newly formed hub:
- the well-known Polity IV dataset, which measures the quality of government (level of democracy, transparency) of contemporary nation states, but which, for most states, goes back to the early 19th century; however, filling in of missing observations for many states are necessary, in particular for colonies for which all estimates are lacking (see an overview).
- a similar measure for the pre 1800 period is ‘constraint on the executive’ – to what extent is the sovereign constrained by institutions (by the law, by representative institutions, by independent communes;
- it is relatively easy to produce datasets with variables such as 1/ does the state have a constitution? 2/ a central bank? 3/is the polity centralized or fragmented? 4/is it a colony or an independent state? What kind of colony (British, Dutch French etc.)? How large is the overseas/colonial empire of different countries (in terms of population or territory)?
- another measure of the ‘quality’ of the state is the ‘state antiquity’ variable. This variable, which measures the length of the state building period and supposedly the stability of the state (which is very high in China, with the oldest unbroken tradition of state formation, and very low in recently created states in for example post-colonial Africa), can easily be measured in the same way for historical periods;
- the stability of states can also be derived from the degree they use the printing press or (what is essentially the same) debasement of the coinage as a hidden tax on their citizens; relative rates of inflation, and/or before 1914, of currency depreciation, can be used as an ‘indirect’ measure of the quality of institutions in a society (these data are essentially collected already by the wages and prices hub).
- a final set of estimates on the capabilities of the state can be based on the share of taxation in GDP or, when estimates of GDP are absent, taxation per capita expressed in the number of wages of unskilled labourer, which can be estimated from different sources (and which increases strongly during the 19th and 20th centuries, pointing at growing state capabilities.
- anthropological research, carried out in the 19th and early 20th century, can be another source of the measurement of institutions. Anthropologists not only collected a lot of information on the kind of societies they were studying, but also published an Ethnographic Atlas which contains an overview of the results of these studies on a global basis; this makes it possible to measure different dimensions of ‘indigenous’ institutions in the period (presumably) before colonization.
- a classification of family systems - associated with differing degrees of individualism - which can be integrated into this global map of institutions is the one suggested by Immanuel Todd.
- a hub on guilds has already been set up at Utrecht University (in cooperation with DANS and IISH) to standardize datasets on guilds and other forms of ‘corporate collective action’; it will produce its results in 2011, and is entirely funded by NWO-middelgroot. Data on guilds, commons, water boards and other forms of ‘corporate collective action’ from a number of European countries (and China) are harmonized and will be published on the web. See the website of this hub.
- Religion: we intend to collect and present information on the religious distribution of the population now, and in certain benchmark years, preferably per century.
