Towards a universal political settlement concept: A response to Mushtaq Khan

Mushtaq khan's political settlement framework has been deservedly influential in recent studies of development, but it has always suffered from some areas of conceptual and methodological ambiguity.1 In a recent article for African Affairs, Khan seeks to clarify his framework as well as positioning it in relation to other influential work in the field.2 Here, Khan goes further than he has before in explaining how his political settlements framework differs from institutionalist approaches such as that of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson,3 arguing persuasively that the same institutions, for example liberal democracy or formally free markets, will have very different effects depending on the distribution of organizational...