Category: Christian Bjørnskov

Monarchy in the Year Ahead

12/26/2015

2015 is coming to an end and its time to look what the year
ahead likely has in store for monarchy.

In Canada 2016 may actually a quiet year. The Governor General's term was extended to 2017 and of the provincial
Lieutenant Governors only PEI's is likely to be replaced in
2016. At the same time the next major national celebration is
the sesquicentennial of Confederation in 2017. However, if a
member of the Royal Family is to attend planning needs to be
started in the coming year. Reminding the Minister of
Canadian Heritage isn't a bad idea.

I predict the Monarchist League of Canada will also develop a
good working relationship with the new government in 2016.

The Queen of Barbados

The Government of Barbados
has announced its intentions
to abolish its monarchy in
2016. Despite this, it is not
entirely certain they will be
able to do so. To change the
constitution the government
will need the opposition's
support to pass the required
legislation. As the opposition
has not indicated they support
this change the government
may not have an easy time.

In Spain the restless Catalonia region may attempt to gain its
independence illegally in 2016. While not a direct threat to
the Spanish Throne it is unfortunate to see the kingdom going
through the uncertainly associated with a separatist
movement within its borders.

Christian Bjørnskov

On the academic front it is possible
Christian Bjørnskov, Martin Rode, and
Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard may continue
their research on monarchy as a form of
government.

I'm sure other studies are in the works
and I intend to publicize them whenever
I find them.

Loyally Yours,
A Kisaragi Colour

We Must go Deeper: An Update on the State of Academic Research on Monarchy

12/4/2014

In my continuing study of monarchy I've started testing the sources I have in actual debate with republicans. The reason for this is two-fold:
-I want to see if republicans have academic research to counter what I have so far.
-I want to see how well the studies I've found so far stand up to scrutiny.

So far republicans have either been unwilling or unable to put up counter research. Putting republicans in the position of having only emotional arguments to fall back on has been rather satisfying. The result of which is why the second objective is important: if you have no evidence of your own your only hope is to attack what evidence there is (ie. mine). The main attack has been that 'correlation does not imply causation'. True enough. For statistical studies this is taken into account by trying to isolate different variables to see which are significant. This charge led me to go over some of the studies I already have. The 2008 study by Christian Bjørnskov & Peter Kurrild‐Klitgaard, Economic Growth & Institutional Reform in Monarchies & Republics, was subjected to this attack. I decided to contact the authors to see what they had to say about this charge (and to see if they knew of any other academic studies):

Prof. Bjørnskov, Aarhus University

Christian Bjørnskov: "About your questions, I haven't seen any other studies. But I will be pursuing this topic further in a project with my coauthor Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard and Martin Rode from the University of Navarre.

On the second question, we got that from the reviewers. That's the reason we're doing the IV estimates in the paper that - so far as is possible - deal with the causality issue. Besides, if we had claimed that monarchies create growth, it would be a plausible argument that growth just allowed monarchy to survive. But since we claim that monarchy only affects growth around major institutional changes, I think it's much more difficult to claim the reverse causality. Anyway, we did what we could to make sure that our estimates are not biased."

Prof. Kurrild‐Klitgaard

Peter Kurrild‐Klitgaard: "1) We have not done much more work on the topic, but the paper was recently published in JITE and there may be changes therein relative to the working paper version you have seen: Link

2) I understand your point but I am not sure I understand why it should be a particular problem here rather than in other regression studies (and this is in fact a panel study with a large number of observations). As you can see we have controlled for a very wide variety of other factors (including a very large number of controls suggested by various reviewers), and the results have remained robust. We may still need to fully understand the precise 'link' but I have no doubt that there is a connection."

The second study that was attacked was the 2006 study by Christian Bjørnskov, Determinants of generalized trust: A cross-country comparison. For this charge I started looking up studies on trust that were larger, more recent, and by different researchers.

The first one I found was a 2012 study called, A Blessing and a Curse? Political Institutions in the Growth and Decay of Generalized Trust: A Cross-National Panel Analysis, 1980–2009 by Blaine G. Robbins. This study has "unbalanced panel data are for 6 time periods with a total of 74 countries and 248 observations". Unlike the previous study this one focuses more on trust over time and shows that while the trust levels in monarchies are rising or stable, other observed groups differed. Most importantly it confirmed the previous work as not being a fluke.

The second study I found was a 2013 study called Trust, Welfare States and Income Equality: What Causes What? by Andreas Bergh and... Christian Bjørnskov (the study of trust being the good professor's primary field). Their study had a "dataset with full information on all main variables includes 104 countries, spanning the globe and all levels of economic and political development". This study also confirmed the conclusions of the previous studies. The study notes that it covers approximately 15 more least developed countries than previous studies and that the results were remarkably similar. This study is also useful for another reason. Its main goal was to see whether welfare states raised trust levels or whether increased trust created welfare states. They found that while high trust levels in a population allowed welfare states to be successfully created, welfare states themselves don't raise trust. So in the event someone says European monarchies have higher trust levels because they have stronger welfare systems you can point to this study to demonstrate the opposite.

There is in fact a few more studies related to this topic that I have, as of yet, been unable to get access to but I'll keep trying. As Christian Bjørnskov noted in his response; he and coauthor Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard will be continuing their research on monarchy with Martin Rode from the University of Navarre. I eagerly await the study's publication.

As always, the new studies have been added to Useful Links.

Loyally Yours,
A Kisaragi Colour

Monarchy in the Year Ahead

We Must go Deeper: An Update on the State of Academic Research on Monarchy

About

Archives

Categories