Keeping Dictators Honest: the Role of Population Concentration

Quoc-Anh Doy and Filipe R. Campante
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Quoc-Anh Doy: SMU

Governance Working Papers from East Asian Bureau of Economic Research

Abstract: In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. We argue and demonstrate with historical evidence that the concentration of population around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index of Spatial Concentration developed by Do & Campante (2008). The evidence supports our predictions : only in the sample of autocracies, population concentration around the capital city is positively associated with better governance and more redistribution (proxied by post-tax inequality), in OLS and IV regressions. Finally, we provide arguments to dismiss possible reverse causation as well as alternative, non-political economy explanations of such regularity,discuss the general applicability of our index and conclude with policy implications.

Keywords: Capital Cities; Gravity; Governance; Inequality; Redistribution; Population Concentration; Revolutions; Harmonic Functions; Axiomatics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 D31 D63 D74 J19 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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