Democracy and the protection of private property

Relying on both legal and political economic theory to organize the various arguments about the efficacy of political institutions in protecting private property, I challenge the common practice of using tax rates as proxy for modeling and/or measuring such threats and advocate focusing on expropriation instead. Just taxation easily allows for the conclusion that the political system functions well enough to protect property. Studying expropriation, however, forces more questions. The normative and political differences between the two policies inspire the main theoretical contribution of the work, namely, specifying what political institution failure to protect property looks like.;The first chapter is the analysis of these differences between taxes and expropriation. It yields three major indicators of state failure to protect private property: lack of compensation, the presence of disproportionate impact in the wake of the policy imposed and, finally, degree of violation, specifically, severe reduction of choice for the property holder. If any of these are present, the state is threatening private property. Just as importantly, the converse is also true. In the absence of any of these, the state is not threatening private property.;The second chapter is an analysis of the various sources of threats to property from the state, especially a democratic state. I focus on the ways constitutional theories and political economy models approach the issue. I show that constitutional theories assign ambiguous roles to state institutions and that political economic models fail to capture relevant issues. Specifically, in constitutional studies, both the executive and legislature are at once argued to sabotage and to protect private property, without an explicit theory of the contradictory motivations. In political economy, relevant models either do not account for the state when addressing the threat of expropriation or they do not account for expropriation when addressing the threat from state.;The final chapter of the dissertation presents an empirical study of expropriation using Kobrin's data set on foreign direct investment expropriation. (This is the most complete data set on expropriation.) I estimate the impact of domestic variables on FDI expropriation, primarily the impact of regime type on the phenomenon.;Throughout my work it is clear that, for all its importance, there is surprisingly little agreement on what constitutes threats to property and surprisingly short-term memory of its importance for constitutional theory and economic efficiency. Currently, 'threats to property' is a catch-all phrase used in places as diverse as the private sector advising on investment strategies, the public sector advising on institution building and the various academic subfields constructing theories tying political institutions to economic outcomes. The wide variety of proxies employed by all these researchers to measure these threats, from rule of law indicators to tax rates, do not all perform the job they are assigned. In clarifying the concept, my work offers guidance about what measures should be used---and, therefore, which proxies would be adequate---and, overall, about when political institutions are a threat to private property. At the same time, my work makes clear that concern with the integrity of private property nonetheless allows states great leeway in meeting regulatory and redistributive goals.