Politics, economics, and violence : the organization of societies and third-party enforcement

Abstract EN

The question “Who will guard the guardians?” is at the heart of a set of questions about how politics and economics interact.

If government provision of justice and protection to societies is an integral part of how well societies perform in economic and political terms, how is it that governments are constrained to perform their functions as agreed in the explicit or implicit social contract? This short essay uses the conceptual framework developed by North, Wallis, and Weingarten in Violence and Social Orders (2009, hereafter NWW) to think about the nexus between governments and economies and the nature of their interaction, particularly the ability of governments to enforce rules by serving as an unbiased third-party enforcer of public laws as well as contracts entered into by private individuals.