Publications

Lacroix J. (2023). Ballots instead of Bullets? The effect of the Voting Rights Act on political violence. Journal of the European Economic Association. (Available here)

The extension of voting rights epitomizes the construction of modern democracies. This paper empirically investigates the effect of such an enfranchisement on political violence in the contextof the US Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, which forbade discrimination in voting. The formula the VRA used to determine the counties it applied to generated both geographic and temporal local discontinuities in enfranchisement. This paper's empirical strategy takes advantage of these features by comparing the evolution of political violence in geographically close covered and non-covered counties. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that VRA coverage halved the incidence and the onset of political violence. Additional empirical evidence implies that voting became the new institutionalized way to state political preferences. Indeed, VRA coverage mostly decreased electoral and small-scale strategic violence. This result is not explained by disaggrievement. Extensions suggest that new strategies of political action may explain a decrease in violence after enfranchisement.

Lacroix J., Méon P.-G. and Oosterlinck K. (2023) Political Dynasties in Defense of Democracy: The Case of France’s 1940 Enabling Act. Journal of Economic History  (Working Paper available here)

The literature on political dynasties in democracies usually considers them as a homogenous group and points out their negative effects. By contrast, we argue that they may differ according to their origin and that democratic dynasties – those whose founder was a defender of democratic ideals – show stronger support for democracy. This claim is backed by an analysis of the vote by the French parliament on July 10, 1940, of an enabling act granting full power to Marshal Philippe Pétain, thereby ending the Third Republic. Using newly collected data from the biographies of the members of the then parliament, we observe that members of a democratic dynasty were more likely, by a margin of between 7.6 and 9.0 percentage points, to oppose the act than were members of other political dynasties or elected representatives belonging to no political dynasty. We report suggestive evidence showing that the effect of democratic dynasties was possibly driven by internalized democratic norms and beliefs.

Lacroix  J., Méon P.-G. and Sekkat K. (2021) Democratic transitions can attract foreign direct investment: Effect, trajectories, and the role of political risk. Journal of Comparative Economics (Available here)

Abstract: Using a difference-in-differences method on a panel of 115 developing countries from 1970 to 2014, we find that democratic transitions do not affect foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, on average. However, consolidated democratic transitions, i.e. transitions that do not go into reverse for at least five years, increase FDI inflows, with the bulk of the improvement appearing 10 years after the transition. Furthermore, when controlling for political risk, the effect of consolidated democratic transitions appears immediately after they have occurred, suggesting that higher political risk in the early years of the new regime offsets their positive intrinsic effect on FDI.

Lacroix J. (2018) Steam democracy up! Industrialization-led opposition in Napoleonic plebiscites. European Review of Economic History (Available here)

Abstract: Which dimension of economic development spurred support to democracy? This study focuses on industrialization as the dimension triggering the process of political “modernization”. It uses a new dataset on Napoleonic plebiscites under the second French Empire (1852–1870). The results in those plebiscites provide a detailed cross-départements (French main administrative units) measure of opposition to autocracy. This study uses the variations in the thriving French modernization to disentangle the effect of industrialization on the vote from the one of other dimensions of economic development. Doubling industrial employment in the Puy-de-Dôme département (median of the distribution) would have decreased support to autocracy by 2.5–5.0 percentage points. An IV strategy using distance to the first city having adopted steam engines, access to coal and waterpower as instruments suggests causality. The baseline results are robust to controlling for other explanations of the vote and to using alternative specifications and estimation methods.