Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Political Economy of Revenue and Regime Stability

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Intellectual Merit. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project analyzes the role of government revenue generation in regime change and stability. Existing research has devoted surprisingly limited attention to this issue, emphasizing instead variations in patterns of government expenditure. In contrast, the proposed research places government revenue at the center of the study of regime stability. Considering both tax and non-tax resources (the latter of which includes foreign aid and state-owned natural resource enterprises), and building on recent theorizing about regime change that focuses on redistribution, the research uses a formal model to generate testable hypotheses about the differential impact of revenue generation on regime dynamics in democracies and authoritarian regimes. The central prediction is that rises and falls in non-tax resources have important implications for the stability of authoritarian, but not democratic, regimes. Three specific hypotheses are developed regarding this prediction, including what should be observed if the underlying theoretical framework is appropriate. The research is designed to test the derived hypotheses, drawing upon both cross-national time-series statistical analysis and an in-depth examination of three theoretically important cases (Bolivia, Botswana, and Mexico). Broader Impact. The research has important implications for three bodies of literature. First, it will advance the broad literature on democratization by developing a theory of how government revenues-both their size and their source-factor into regime change. Second, the research will build on and extend recent influential works that have focused on formally modeling the distributional dynamics underlying regime transitions. Third, the research will attempt to demonstrate that some insights developed in the literature on the "rentier" state-principally regarding how oil revenues affect regime dynamics- have broader applications than have been appreciated to date. The reason is that oil revenues are an important example of a broader set of resources-non-tax resources- whose importance has been understudied. This aspect of the project should also have important international economic policy implications, as another important example of non-tax resources is foreign aid.