Development and History
Development and Economic History
Members of the Development and Economic History Research Group combine archival data, lab-in-the-field experiments, randomized controlled trials, text analysis, survey and secondary data along with theoretical tools to study issues in development and economic history. Faculty and students work in the field in South Asia, China and Africa as well as doing archival work in libraries across Europe and Asia.
Almost all faculty are members of CAGE in the economics department and some are also members of Warwick Interdisciplinary Centre for International Development (WICID). There is a regular weekly external seminar, two weekly internal workshops, and high quality research students. We also organise international conferences on campus, or in Venice.
Our activities
Development and Economic History Research Group Workshop/Seminar
Monday: 1.00-2.00pm
For faculty and PhD students at Warwick and other top-level academic institutions across the world. For a detailed scheduled of speakers please follow the link below.
Organisers: Bishnupriya Gupta and Claudia Rei
People
Academics
Academics associated with the Development and Economic History Research Group are:
Research Students
Events
Economic History Seminar - Toike Aidt (Cambridge)
Title: Can democratic reforms promote political activism? Evidence from the Great Reform Act of 1832 (with Gabriel Leon-Ablan)
Abstract: Activists play a key role in the process of democratic transition and consolidation.
How is their activism affected by democratic reforms? We study how local activism responded to
the changes in representation introduced by Britain’s Great Reform Act. This reform
removed all parliamentary representation from some areas; other areas gained
representation for the first time. We exploit exogenous variation in which areas lost
and gained representation and measure activism using the number of petitions each area
sent to parliament. We find that petitioning increased in areas that gained representation,
partly because of greater civil society mobilization. We also find that petitioning fell in
areas that lost representation. This shows that pro-democratic reforms can promote political
activism, while anti-democratic reforms can decrease it. In the case of Britain, there
could have been positive feedback between activism and reform, making democratization a
path-dependent process and the Great Reform Act its critical juncture.