Authoritarian states hold an advantage over democratic ones because they can act quickly and decisively, right? Wrong. Hoover fellow Barry R. Weingast and his coauthor, Kenneth A. Schultz, argue that every time an authoritarian state and a liberal state get into a protracted fight, the liberal state wins. Here Weingast and Schultz examine the century and a quarter of conflict between England and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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