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

知识价值。本博士论文研究项目分析了政府收入在政权更迭和稳定中的作用。令人惊讶的是，现有的研究对这一问题的关注有限，而是强调政府支出模式的变化。相反，本研究将政府收入置于政权稳定性研究的中心位置。考虑到税收和非税收资源（后者包括外国援助和国有自然资源企业），并基于最近关注再分配的政权更迭理论，本研究使用一个正式模型来生成关于民主和专制政权中收入产生对政权动态的不同影响的可检验假设。其核心预测是，非税资源的涨跌对威权（而非民主）政权的稳定具有重要影响。关于这一预测，提出了三个具体的假设，包括如果潜在的理论框架是适当的，应该观察到什么。该研究旨在通过跨国时间序列统计分析和对三个理论上重要的案例（玻利维亚、博茨瓦纳和墨西哥）的深入研究，检验推导出的假设。更广泛的影响。该研究对三种文献具有重要意义。首先，它将通过发展政府收入（包括其规模和来源）如何影响政权更迭的理论，推进有关民主化的广泛文献。其次，该研究将建立和扩展最近有影响力的工作，这些工作集中在正式建模制度变迁背后的分布动力学上。第三，本研究将试图证明，文献中关于“食利者”国家（主要是关于石油收入如何影响政权动态）的一些见解，具有比迄今为止所认识到的更广泛的应用。原因在于，石油收入是一系列更广泛的资源（非税资源）的一个重要例子，而这些资源的重要性尚未得到充分研究。该项目的这一方面也应具有重要的国际经济政策含义，因为非税资源的另一个重要例子是外援。

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 ofhow 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 focusedon formally modeling the distributional dynamics underlying regime transitions. Third,the research will attempt to demonstrate that some insights developed in the literature onthe "rentier" state-principally regarding how oil revenues affect regime dynamics-have broader applications than have been appreciated to date. The reason is that oilrevenues 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 haveimportant international economic policy implications, as another important example ofnon-tax resources is foreign aid.