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

智力上的功绩。这篇博士论文研究项目分析了政府创收在政权更迭和稳定中的作用。现有的研究对这一问题的关注出人意料地有限，反而强调政府支出模式的变化。相比之下，拟议中的研究将政府收入置于政权稳定性研究的中心。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)，并建立在最近侧重于再分配的政权更迭理论的基础上，该研究使用了一个正式模型来生成可检验的假设，即在民主和威权政权中，税收创造对政权动态的不同影响。核心预测是，非税资源的起伏对威权政权(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，应该观察什么。这项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)的深入研究来检验所得出的假设。这项研究对三类文献具有重要意义。首先，它将通过发展一种关于政府收入--其规模及其来源--因素如何影响政权变迁的理论，来推进民主化的广泛文献。其次，该研究将建立和扩展最近有影响力的著作，这些著作专注于对政权变迁背后的分配动态进行正式建模。第三，这项研究将试图证明，文献中关于“食利者”国家的一些见解--主要是关于石油收入如何影响政权动态--具有比迄今所认识到的更广泛的应用。原因是，石油收入是更广泛的资源--非税资源--重要性一直未得到充分研究的一个重要例子。该项目的这一方面还应具有重要的国际经济政策影响，因为非税资源的另一个重要例子是对外援助。

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.