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CIVIL LIBERTY‐AN ECONOMETRIC INVESTIGATION
Author(s) -
Bilson John F. O.
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
kyklos
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1467-6435
pISSN - 0023-5962
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6435.1982.tb01217.x
Subject(s) - economics , salary , politics , political freedom , economic freedom , per capita , civil liberties , empirical research , property rights , wage , labour economics , political science , law , sociology , market economy , microeconomics , democracy , population , philosophy , demography , epistemology
SUMMARY Many governments allocate resources to the repression of the political freedom of their citizens. The dominant economic theory of this activity, associated most prominently with the work of HAYEK, is that political repression is a bi‐product of the erosion of economic freedom. This theory predicts that civil liberty will be positively correlated with the degree of economic freedom. An alternative view, derived from models of industrial behavior, is that monopolistic governments will use political repression to protect their property rights, so that concentrated party systems will tend to engage in more repression than competitive systems. Using a cross‐sectional sample of 184 states in 1979, an empirical test of the two hypotheses is presented and the evidence is shown to be more consistent with the second hypothesis. In addition, the correlation between civil liberty and a variety of economic variables is examined: the degree of civil liberty is found to positively related to the level of real per capita income and to the ratio of wage and salary payments to total income. The G astil index of civil liberty provides the empirical foundation for the study.