Military Spending and Inequality in Autocracies
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Soeren C. Schwuchow
Abstract
In this note, we outline a general framework for analyzing how inequality and military spending interact in a society governed by a rent-seeking autocrat. Relying on a general equilibrium model, we show that, generally, the autocrat utilizes the military for redistribution in favor of poorer citizens. However, the dictator’s own rent-seeking activity weakens the extent of redistribution and, in the extreme, can even reverse its direction, yielding more unequal secondary distributions instead. Accordingly, the initial level of inequality also affects the impact of military spending on inequality as the former has an impact on the extent of both, the regime’s rent-seeking activity as well as redistribution. Here, our model shows that primary and secondary distributions are rather equal for extreme initial equality/inequality. For medium levels of initial inequality, redistribution is rather large and can be in favor of the poor or of the rich, depending on the extent of rent-seeking and the primary distribution. Based on these results, we highlight the importance of a society’s institutional framework for analyzing the relation of inequality and military spending.
Acknowledgment
The author thanks Federica Carugati, Raul Caruso, Casper Sakstrup, and Petros Sekeris for very helpful comments. All remaining errors are mine.
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©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial
- Introduction to the Proceedings of the 18th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference
- Survey or Review
- Systematic Study of Gender, Conflict, and Peace
- Letters and Proceedings
- Political Initiatives and Peacekeeping: Assessing Multiple UN Conflict Resolution Tools
- US Military Response to the Risk of Terrorist Attacks
- Do Foreign Aid Projects Attract Transnational Terrorism?
- Military Spending and Inequality in Autocracies
- Beyond a Bag of Words: Using PULSAR to Extract Judgments on Specific Human Rights at Scale
- Predicting Terrorism with Machine Learning: Lessons from “Predicting Terrorism: A Machine Learning Approach”
- Conflict in Cyber-Space: The Network of Cyber Incidents, 2000–2014
- What do they Want? Rebels’ Objectives and Civil War Mediation
