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AbstractIn recent years, a variety of countries worldwide have experienced an increase in executive power. Long‐standing concerns about this concentration include reduced property rights protection. Particularly for developing democracies, scholars theorize that a lack of institutional constraints on the executive may impede long‐term investment. Analyzing this question empirically has proven difficult, however, because economic activity can affect political institutions and behavior. This article, which analyzes four decades of data from 57 developing democracies, addresses the identification challenges by leveraging elections as a source of exogenous turnover and by accounting for the potential endogeneity of executive institutions. Consistent with the argument that institutional constraints reassure investors, the results suggest that as constraints on the executive increase, investment is less affected by prospective electoral turnover. Moreover, the results are stronger for presidential and semi‐presidential systems with fixed elections, where the chief executive's term cannot be ended early by elections or the legislature, than for parliamentary systems.

This article discusses the development of 'heterodox' economics at universities in Germany since the 1970s. Based on Lakatos' concept of scientific research programmes (SRP), the article introduces a classification of economics in order to clarify the understanding of variety within economics, especially in the case of Germany. Based on this classification and taking into account the different kinds of capital (economic, social and symbolic) available to heterodox economists, this article aims to show how heterodox economics in Germany has developed from the early 1970s until the present day. It will be shown that the heterodox schools expanded in the 1970s, but marginalisation took hold again by the 1980s and ultimately left German heterodox economics in a state of near-extinction today. From this, it follows that the history of heterodoxy in Germany is an unequal 'battle of the paradigms', and can only be told as the story of a failure.

In the context of ongoing criticisms of the lack of pluralism in economics, the present article aims to discuss the development of 'heterodox' economics since the 1970s. Following Lakatos's concept of scientific research programs (srp), and concentrating on the situation in Germany, the article will discuss classifications of economics, and will specify the understanding of diversity in the light of 'axiomatic variations' of the economic mainstream. This will form the basis for the subsequent description of the development of heterodoxy in Germany, with special reference to the founding of new universities and the reform movements in the 1970s. It can be shown that the heterodox scene flourished in this period, but that this pluralization remained fragmented and short-lived; by the 1980s at the latest heterodoxy was again on its way to marginalization. The history of heterodoxy in Germany thus presents itself as an unequal 'battle of the paradigms', and can only be told as the story of a failure.