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| 1 |
ID:
168560
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why do autocratic leaders escape revolution, coups, and assassination during times of economic crisis? I argue that the spike in natural resource revenues since the 1960s has increased autocratic crisis resilience. The availability of this alternative revenue stream provides autocratic leaders with a constant inflow of money, increases their ability to repress dissent, and improves their access to international credit. Extending the analysis back to 1875, I show that the relationship between economic crisis and irregular leader removal in autocracies is strong and robust before the 1960s, but disappears in more recent periods. Interaction analyses confirm that the effects of economic crisis are moderated by natural resource income. These findings are robust to an array of alternative specifications, including analyses that address endogeneity concerns via instrumental variable (IV) estimation. A more particular examination of the theoretical mechanisms also supports the argument. These findings challenge widely held beliefs in the literature of a strong, direct effect of economic crisis on autocratic leader survival; they explain why economic crisis seems to destabilize some autocrats, but not others.
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| 2 |
ID:
193649
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| Summary/Abstract |
Democracy often confronts citizens with a dilemma: stand firm on democracy while losing out on policy or accept undemocratic behavior and gain politically. Existing literature demonstrates that citizens generally choose the latter—and that they do so deliberately. Yet there is an alternative possibility. Citizens can avoid this uncomfortable dilemma altogether by rationalizing their understandings of democracy. When a politician advances undesired policies without violating democratic rules and norms, people find ways to perceive the behavior as undemocratic. When a politician acts undemocratically to promote desired policies, citizens muster up arguments for considering it democratic. Original survey experiments in the United States, and 22 democracies worldwide, provide strong support for this argument. It is thus not deliberate acceptance, but a fundamentally different perceptual logic that drives the widespread approval of undemocratic behavior in today’s democracies.
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| 3 |
ID:
173132
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, we investigate the relationship between elections and coup attempts. We argue that elections have opposing effects on the risk of coup attempts, depending on the state of the economy in which they are held. Elections occurring in conditions of economic crisis spur anti-government mobilization and high levels of state repression. This increases the subsequent risk of coup attempts. Conversely, elections held during economic expansion induce pro-government mobilization and waning repression, which reduces the subsequent risk of coups. We find strong support for these propositions in a statistical analysis of 130 countries that conducted contested elections in the period 1952 to 2013. The results are robust to an array of model specifications, including when we account for election outcome, postelection economic performance, and the possibility that both elections and economic performance are endogenous to coup attempts.
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