From coercion to politics to law: The evolution of property rights protection

• Main Author: HUANG, Fali
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Property Rights; Coercion; Politics; Law; Democratization; Factor Composition; Monarchy; Democracy; Suffrage Extension.; Political Economy; Property Law and Real Estate
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2059; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/3058/viewcontent/3_huang_fali.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper shows how property rights security improves over time as a result of increasing legal quality and political democratization in a political economy context, where political and legal institutions adapt to evolving factor composition of land and capital in the dynamic economic development process. There seems to exist a clear sequence of di⁄erent forms of protection in that it is unlikely to have a strong rule of law with an exploitative political regime, or to have a democratic political system when the distribution of potential coercive power is too skewed. The routine form of protection thus shifts from coercion to politics and then to law. The predictions of the model are consistent with general historical patterns in England.