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Economic Growth and Political Survival
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Paul J. Burke
Published/Copyright:
March 14, 2012
Using data for 162 countries for the period 1962-2006, this paper examines the importance of the national economic growth rate for the ability of a national leader to retain his or her position. To address the potential endogeneity of economic growth, I use commodity prices, export partner incomes, precipitation, and temperature to instrument for a country’s growth rate. The results indicate that faster economic growth increases the short-run likelihood that leaders will remain in office. The results are robust to controlling for a host of leader-, party-, and country-level variables. The effect of growth on the likelihood of leader exits appears to be generally similar across both democracies and autocracies. Economic growth has the largest impact on the likelihood of regular leader exits rather than irregular exits such as coups. Evidence is also presented on whether economic growth affects the likelihood that leaders employ oppressive tactics against opponents.
Published Online: 2012-3-14
©2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Keywords for this article
economic growth;
politics;
political survival;
political change;
leader turnover
Articles in the same Issue
- Advances Article
- Life Cycle Dynamics of Income Uncertainty and Consumption
- Immigration, Fiscal Policy, and Welfare in an Aging Population
- Contributions Article
- Who Gets the Credit? And Does It Matter? Household vs. Firm Lending Across Countries
- How Much Did the 2009 Australian Fiscal Stimulus Boost Demand? Evidence from Household-Reported Spending Effects
- Economic Growth and Political Survival
- Exchange Rate Uncertainty and Trade
- Monetary and Macroprudential Policy Rules in a Model with House Price Booms
- A Unified Framework for Using Micro-Data to Compare Dynamic Time-Dependent Price-Setting Models
- Government Policy Response to War-Expenditure Shocks
- Poverty Traps and Growth in a Model of Endogenous Time Preference
- Where Has All the Money Gone? Foreign Aid and the Composition of Government Spending
- Great Spending Crashes
- Capital Utilization and the Amplification Mechanism
- Topics Article
- Unemployment Expectations and the Business Cycle
- Sector-Specific Capital, Labor Market Distortions and Cross-Country Income Differences: A Two-Sector General Equilibrium Approach
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- Consumption, Leisure and Borrowing Constraints
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- The Laffer Curve in a Frictional Labor Market
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