Growth and Governance: A Defense

Abstract

It is clear we have disagreements from our esteemed colleagues on this important issue. The Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi [hereafter KKM] response raises a number of insightful points that advance this debate. We thank them for that and for taking the time to engage our article. As we have reflected on our original essay and KKM’s critique of it, we were struck by the fact that we may actually be talking past each other and that differences in approach between political science and economics may foster this miscommunication. We are not arguing that political science offers a superior approach. To the contrary, our intellectual debt to economics is enormous. Our bibliography offers testimony to that very fact. We nevertheless believe that political scientists have as much to offer economists as vice versa, including not only a venerable literature on state formation and governance but a no less important tradition of self-conscious concept formation that has been less central to most economists. While political scientists have traditionally been producers of political data, and have therefore treated the process of concept formation as a necessary prelude to both measurement and modeling (Collier and Mahon 1993; Gerring 1999; Sartori 1970), economists have until recently been consumers of political data and have, therefore, subordinated the need for self-conscious concept formation to the understandable urge to measure and model. We ultimately hope to demonstrate that conceptual issues—and corresponding measurement problems—are at the core of the debate over growth and governance and that progress will be less than ideal until they are addressed. A meeting of minds may be too much to ask for at the present time, but a meeting of method would almost certainly constitute a step in the right direction. We, therefore, offer this rebuttal as not just a response to the thoughtful critique of KKM, but as an effort to bridge these gaps and develop even better ways to make real advances in understanding the relationship between growth and governance.