Research

Why do environmentally and economically costly fossil fuel subsidies persist? One explanation may be election timing, since rising gasoline prices can harm a leader’s reelection prospects. Drawing on theories of retrospective economic voting, I argue that incumbents reduce the risk of electoral backlash by controlling gasoline prices as an election nears, especially when they cannot offset rising prices with more comprehensive social assistance policies. I evaluate this argument using monthly gasoline price data from 1990 to 2015 for more than 90 democracies. I find that when incumbents are uncertain about their electoral prospects, the impact of a pending election on gasoline prices is negative in democracies with low state capacity, and the effect is economically meaningful in terms of reduced per-liter cost. The findings contribute to our understanding of the political determinants of fossil fuel subsidies, opportunistic business cycles, and the political and distributional challenges of adopting effective climate policy.

We argue that macroeconomic performance shapes the evasion of presidential term limits in two ways: first, by influencing the decision to extend, abolish, or simply avoid term limits, and second, by shaping the choice to rely on judicial decisions, legislative action, or a public referendum for implementation. Drawing on the theory of retrospective economic voting, we argue that strong economic performance increases the likelihood of evasion types and methods subject to voter participation in the process, such as extending and abolishing term limits and employing public referendum. Weak economic performance, by contrast, encourages presidents to avoid term limits altogether or adopt evasion methods that allow them to mitigate public scrutiny. We collect new data that codes details about the methods used in more than 80 instances of presidential term limit violations globally and find robust empirical support for these claims. We find particularly strong evidence that increases in unemployment are associated with a higher risk of avoidance, since this strategy allows presidents to stay in office while evading punishment at the polls. Faster rates of economic growth, by contrast, are associated with greater risk of extending and abolishing term limits, and the use of public referenda that legitimate these changes.

The recent proliferation of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in authoritarian regimes is puzzling. While SWFs can generate political, financial, and geopolitical benefits in the long-term, their creation also sharply impedes an autocrat’s ability to fund current patronage and other regime-stabilizing public and private goods. What explains the creation of autocratic SWFs? We argue that sovereign wealth funds are more likely to emerge when autocratic leaders possess a high degree of policy-making autonomy. Policy-making autonomy allows leaders to override any opposition from regime insiders who might prefer to keep capital at home and available for patronage. At the same time, such leaders are more politically secure, and thus are more confident that they will remain in power to reap the medium to long-term financial rewards of these funds. We operationalize this concept with indicators that measure whether an autocrat has consolidated their authority over the regime’s party infrastructure and employ survival analysis on a global sample of autocratic regimes from 1960–2010. We find robust support for our argument and describe how our findings provide new insights on the political determinants of sovereign wealth funds and the consequences of authoritarian power-sharing institutions.

Recent studies suggest that political institutions have little impact on the size of consumer fossil fuel subsidies, concluding instead that subsidies reflect country-specific and slowly changing economic factors. Such findings bode poorly for reforming these costly policies. I argue that this conclusion stems from an overly narrow view of the kinds of non-democratic regimes that exist. I introduce a large literature from political science that distinguishes “electoral authoritarian” regimes from other non-democracies and develop a theoretical argument connecting the former’s reliance on broad-based public support to higher levels of fossil fuel subsidies. I test the argument using a price-gap measure of domestic consumer gasoline subsides for more than 160 countries for most years between 1990 and 2014. The results demonstrate that the emergence of electoral authoritarianism is associated with larger fuel subsidies, and that an increase in hydrocarbon production revenue has a larger impact on the size of subsidies within electoral authoritarian systems than in other regime types. Reform efforts must acknowledge this political logic while focusing on how to offset subsidies with less environmentally harmful measures.

When is oil a curse for health outcomes? This paper addresses the question by analyzing the effect of oil wealth on child mortality rates in nondemocratic countries. We argue that oil is particularly likely to harm child mortality when leaders have short time horizons. Such leaders are more likely to use oil revenues to finance private goods and patronage which builds their support coalition at the expense of public goods that benefit the broader population. We test this argument using panel regression and a global sample of nondemocratic regimes, supplemented with a case study of Cameroon. Results from both empirical approaches are consistent with our argument. These findings identify some specific conditions under which oil can be detrimental to child mortality, and thus explain some of the variation in health outcomes across oil-producing states.

Autocratic elections occur on uneven playing fields, yet their regular contestation compels ruling parties to pay attention to citizens’ demands. This claim is at the heart of research linking multiparty elections in autocracies to improvements in human development. Recent work, however, casts doubt on the theoretical and empirical basis of such claims. This paper addresses this debate by focusing specifically on the adoption of social assistance programs, an often theorized but seldom examined link in the chain connecting electoral autocracy with improvements in human development. I demonstrate that electoral autocracies are more likely to adopt these programs than closed autocracies and that the impact largely works through within-country changes in the presence of electoral authoritarianism. The results are consistent with the argument that such regimes are more responsive to citizens’ demands. However, they also remind researchers that the goal of such regimes is to win elections; there is little preventing them from crafting targeted social policies that secure the loyalty of the voting public but without the attendant improvements in broad measures of human development. I conclude with suggestions for how future research can better understand how authoritarian governance shapes development outcomes.

Personalist regimes are more reliant on natural resource rents than other models of autocracy, but the direction of causation is unclear. Resource wealth could finance patronage and allow leaders to skip construction of institutionalized systems of rule, leading to more personalized autocracies. Conversely, personalist leaders may increase resource extraction, since diversifying the economy could increase the power of rivals. I use data on the degree of personalism and level of oil income to disentangle these interpretations. The results show that increases in oil income are associated with subsequent increases in personalism within autocracies. Since personalist regimes are less likely to successfully democratize, the results also provide important evidence as to why oil impedes democracy.

Oil wealth tends to impede democracy, but scholars disagree about both why and under what conditions. This note helps answer these questions by evaluating the field's foundational theory of the rentier state, which claims that oil wealth finances generous societal benefits that reduce citizens’ demands for representation and hinder the emergence of democratic regimes. I create a new measure of such benefits, focusing specifically on the size of domestic gasoline subsidies in dollars per capita. I then use a global sample from 1990 through 2014 to demonstrate that greater spending on these subsidies significantly reduces the likelihood of a transition toward democracy. The impact on democratization is as consequential in practical terms as are large increases in the rate of economic growth. Moreover, including the measure of fuel subsidies helps account for the autocratic effect of oil income. I conclude by highlighting how this fuel subsidy data can shed light on a number of other political economy questions.

Do natural resources have harmful economic consequences? This question is central to the interdisciplinary “resource curse” literature, but important questions remain unanswered. At the same time, the discovery of new resource deposits around the world and technological developments that enable greater resource extraction make understanding the dynamics of the resource curse even more pressing. This article addresses these issues by focusing on the relationship between resource abundance and fiscal outcomes, which we argue more accurately reflects the causal mechanisms emphasized in existing research than aggregate economic outcomes like increases in gross domestic product per capita. We describe a variety of hypotheses linking resource abundance to fiscal health, including how political and institutional factors can either mitigate or exacerbate the effect of resource wealth, and test these arguments using state‐level data from the United States encompassing the years 1992‐2014. This focus on subnational variation helps minimize some of the limitations of the cross‐country comparisons that have dominated the prior literature. Our regression results suggest that, contrary to the most pessimistic theories, resource wealth is often associated with stronger fiscal performance at the state level. However, a number of factors, including levels of political polarization, legislative term limits, and lower wage growth, negate these benefits. Related Articles: Khodr , Hiba . 2014 . “.” Politics & Policy 42 (): 271 ‐ 310 . https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12068 Day , Jonathan , and Keith Boeckelman . 2012 . “.” Politics & Policy 40 (): 320 ‐ 338 . https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2012.00347.x Prier , Eric , and Kevin Wagner . 2009 . “.” Politics & Policy 37 (): 101 ‐ 125 . https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2008.00163.x

A growing literature demonstrates that “unearned income”—such as that which stems from natural resources—stabilizes authoritarian regimes. In this paper, we refine this argument to emphasize not just the volume of these rents but also their diversity and the extent to which they can act as substitutes for one another. Specifically, a greater number of distinct sources of rents, and a more equitable distribution among them, provide an important hedge against any sudden change in the ability of autocracies to capture these rents and should lead to more stable regimes. We use a procedure from the literature on market concentration to develop a single measure, termed rent diversification , which captures these characteristics. We then use this new measure in a quantitative analysis examining the likelihood of regime failure. Our findings provide strong evidence that autocracies with more diversified rent portfolios are much less likely to collapse.

Why do some countries participate in IMF programs while others refuse to do so? We suggest an answer to the question by unpacking one side of the typical democracy–autocracy dichotomy. Specifically, we utilize the growing literature on the varieties of authoritarianism to develop an argument linking the different incentives and constraints that leaders in party-based, personalist, and military regimes face when considering whether to sign agreements with the IMF. Empirically, we demonstrate that distinguishing among autocracies uncovers important variations in the sensitivity of such regimes to the political costs incurred by IMF participation. Party-based autocracies, for instance, respond to both sovereignty costs and the benefits of program participation during severe economic crises. Personalist regimes, however, are not sensitive to the sovereignty costs incurred with IMF participation and thus only participate when doing so provides needed revenue during economic crises. The unique features of military juntas, by contrast, suggests that such regimes are not sensitive to either of these political costs and thus do not respond to economic crises in the same way as their autocratic counterparts.

Thanks in large part to survey efforts such as the Afrobarometer, scholars have developed and tested a variety of theoretical models explaining why citizens in sub-Saharan Africa hold supportive or, conversely, dissatisfied attitudes toward the economic and political reforms of the last several decades. Much of this research highlights citizens’ rational evaluation of the new regimes’ performance as the critical component. In this article, we advance an alternative argument, namely that citizens also care about the origins of these political and economic transformations. When citizens view these changes as externally imposed, they are less likely to develop supportive and satisfied attitudes toward the process of economic reform and democracy. Original interview data from Dakar, Senegal strongly supports our argument. The findings have important implications for a continent where economic and political institutions have long been shaped by outside actors.

On average, democracy reduces political risk for foreign investors, yet this emphasis on regime type obscures the tremendous variation within autocracies. Moreover, conventional explanations emphasizing the role of checks and balances are ill‐suited to explain why some autocracies, which typically lack these features, are associated with such low‐risk environments. This article explains variations in political risk by emphasizing the role of autocratic leader replacement. Autocrats select from a heterogeneous mixture of private goods to appease narrow‐winning coalitions. Leader replacement in such regimes is, therefore, associated with new winning coalitions and new private goods. When turnover is frequent, the policy environment becomes more volatile and political risk increases relative to autocracies with more stable leadership. Importantly, the risk‐increasing effect of turnover holds for both irregular and rule‐bound leader transitions in autocracies. These predictions are strongly supported through cross‐national quantitative analysis employing a new measure of leaders’ risk of political replacement.

Income inequality is frequently given a central role in explaining diverse political outcomes, but the specifics of how, when, and under what circumstances inequality really matters are far from clear. This paper addresses these questions by examining whether greater levels of inequality raise the risk of expropriation associated with foreign investment. The results demonstrate that inequality matters in two distinct ways. First, inequality elevates risk, although consistent with the argument developed herein, the effect is strongest when chief executives face high constraints on their decision making. Second, inequality mitigates the otherwise protective influence of political institutions on the risk of expropriation. The findings are robust across a variety of estimation strategies, including instrumental variable procedures that correct for error in the measurement of inequality. The findings provide new insights regarding the determinants of foreign investment while simultaneously resolving one part of the contested literature describing inequality's role in the political economy of development.

Influential studies by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson claim that colonial legacies explain the origins of development-promoting property rights and thus account for the modern world income distribution. Specifically, they argue that European colonial powers engineered a global ‘reversal of fortune’, bringing property rights and prosperity to relatively uninhabited colonies while imposing inefficient institutions on locales with less potential for settlement. We re-evaluate their theoretical arguments and empirical findings and come to a different conclusion. We concur that British colonialism dramatically restructured four colonies, resulting in phenomenal economic success. For the majority of the world, however, colonialism had no discernible effect on property rights. We conclude that contemporary development studies must find another explanation for the modern world income distribution.

A large literature evaluates the correlates of mass attitudes toward democracy because such attitudes are regarded as critical for the stability and depth of democratic regimes. This article uses cross-national public opinion surveys to conduct the first comprehensive test of this conventional wisdom. The authors examine whether aggregate levels of democratic legitimacy are related to the level, stability, and deepening of democracy and find no empirical support for these theoretical expectations. Rather, the authors find evidence that legitimacy attitudes are significantly shaped by the prior institutionalization of democracy, suggesting that the existing literature may have reversed the direction of the causal arrow.

A growing body of evidence holds that citizens support democracy when they believe the regime has provided individual freedoms and political rights. Put simply, citizens develop legitimacy attitudes by learning about democracy. These findings, however, are based on citizens' evaluations of the procedural elements of democracy. Democratization also entails substantive reforms that likely impact legitimacy attitudes. This article provides the first test of how the success – and failure – of substantive democratization shapes legitimacy attitudes. Using data from the second round of Afrobarometer surveys, I find surprising results. Citizens who judge the regime to be more successful in substantive democratization are actually less likely to be committed democrats. I conclude with possible explanations of these surprising findings and reflect on the challenges for both future research and for the new democracies facing this situation.