This paper examines the relationship between the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture and political instability using a dataset covering around 100 countries. To shed light on the causal effect of culture on political instability, the identification strategy exploits the variation in historical pathogen prevalence and the information provided by the genetic distance between countries. The results reveal that individualism has a negative and statistically significant impact on the degree of political instability, which means that this cultural trait contributes to making the political environment more stable. This finding is robust to the inclusion in the analysis of a substantial number of controls that may be correlated with both individualism and political instability, including other cultural dimensions. In fact, the relationship between individualism and political instability does not depend either on the specific measures used to quantify the level of individualism and political instability within the various countries or the estimation strategy adopted. The estimates also show that part of the observed effect of individualism is due to the impact of institutional quality, which acts as a transmission channel linking this cultural trait and political instability.

本文使用涵盖约100个国家的数据集，考察了文化的个人主义-集体主义维度与政治不稳定之间的关系。为了阐明文化对政治不稳定的因果关系，识别策略利用了历史病原体流行程度的变化以及国家之间遗传距离所提供的信息。结果表明，个人主义对政治不稳定的程度具有负面和统计学上的显着影响，这意味着这种文化特质有助于使政治环境更加稳定。这一发现对于将大量可能与个人主义和政治动荡（包括其他文化层面）相关的控制纳入分析之中是有力的。实际上，个人主义与政治动荡之间的关系既不取决于用来量化各国内部个人主义与政治动荡程度的具体措施，也不取决于所采用的估算策略。这些估计还表明，观察到的个人主义影响的部分原因是体制质量的影响，而体制质量是将这种文化特征和政治不稳定联系起来的传播渠道。