Jean-Paul Faguet

We take the subset of data on Columbia that measures and catalogs all the ravines, the rivers, the forests, the valleys, all of this geographic stuff. And we use that to calculate the least cost path for between all the places that we know this 1560 imperial agent went to who was trying to recreate their steps.

So a very long-winded way of saying that our instrument in this case is the path of the conquistadores through Colombia that they took founding all of these encomiendas. And then we measure the distance from each municipality to the closest point on that path. And that's our instrument, which we argue is highly correlated to where the encomienda is or was in 1560.

But it should be the distance to the path should be uncorrelated to education, health, infant mortality or GDP per capita. There's no reason for that distance variable to map on to modern development outcomes.

It's a very strong statistical correlation across 20 different measures of development outcomes, human capital, social capital, institutional development, and crucially economic outcomes today. And all of these outcomes today are around 2005-2010. So modern 21st century outcomes are being driven by the encomienda in 1560.

And this, you know, by itself is a kind of a stunning outcome because you think, okay, this thing in 1560 was really important and it structured the Spanish empire in lots of important ways in 1560. How can it be having an effect in the 21st century? And yet, you know, this is what we find.

And again, seven years trying to break it down and make it go away and it doesn't go away regardless of what we throw at it.

Yeah, so that paper is about the stunning collapse of Bolivia's political party system around 2003, 2004, which was a political party system in a country with chronically weak democratic institutions and many coups and general institutional instability, but a political party system, meaning a set of political parties competing in a given country

ideological and political space against each other that was remarkably stable between 1952 and 2002. This system got set up after the revolution of 1952 and the system persisted. The same political parties came back After coups, after macroeconomic shocks, after guerrilla uprisings, Che Guevara didn't die in Cuba and he didn't die in Argentina.

He died in Bolivia where he was trying to stoke revolution. And the political party system was completely robust to this.

Yeah, exactly. You still have the political parties that were still there. Some of them would have been cooperating with the dictator who happened to be there in power at the moment. And in any event, when the dictator fell, the same parties, even the same individuals would come back.

So, you know, if you trace Bolivia's presidents and cabinet ministers who then ascend to presidents, it's just remarkably stable for 50 years after the sorts of shocks that would have, and in fact, in other countries, did bring down entire political systems. And the Bolivian parties were robust to this. And then suddenly the whole system falls apart in 2003.

According to popular understanding, it's the kind of thing that you read even in the educated press, like the New York Times or The Economist or whatever, it seems to be caused by a series of demonstrations against water privatization in Cochabamba and then against provision or construction of a gas pipeline to Chile, to the historic enemy, Chile. They fought a war in the 19th century.

Like the idea that a couple of demonstrations in Cochabamba and La Paz brought down political party systems that have withstood 50,000 percent inflation and something like 15 coup d'etat is absurd. Right. No, it can't be.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I can answer the first question better if I answer the second one first, and then the first one becomes quite kind of clearer. So the

The theory that I use in this paper is something that was created by a couple of very smart political scientists who did political sociology in the mid-20th century called Martin Lipset and Stein Rakan, and they were analyzing Western Europe. And their theory is that a political party system will operate in an ideological and programmatic space.

Now, by programmatic space, I mean, what are the issues and how do you combine different issues? So it's not obvious, for example, that if you're pro-business, you're going to be, I don't know, anti-LGBTQ or something like that. That happens to happen. In a number of countries. In other countries, it doesn't necessarily, those issues don't combine in a particular way.

Or if you're right wing, you're going to be pro-farmer. It's not obvious that that would be the case, but it does happen in some places and it doesn't in others. So what they say is that a political party system should have main characteristics that map onto the main political cleavage. And they coined this term, a political cleavage, which defines the society.

And so through a series of historical processes in Western Europe, you get a party system that's left versus right, where left is pro-worker party. Pro-larger government with bigger taxes and a bigger welfare state that's in favor of the little guy, as it were. And right wing is pro-capital, pro-business. Capitalism, the owners of capital, the owners of businesses, factories, etc.

Pro-business, lower taxes, a smaller state. And in Europe, this also maps into center versus periphery because of the nature of the national revolution that happened typically in Germany and Italy in the 19th century, the 1800s, for example.

So without getting too much into detail on Europe, what I find for Bolivia is that Bolivia had kind of the wrong political party system built on a false cleavage that did not define the Bolivian society and wasn't reflected by Bolivians, by who they are, by the main things that do actually characterize Bolivian society.