Structured Stability Spending in Late Modern Empires: Japan, Germany, Ottoman State, and Brazil

Austin M. Mitchell

Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2022, vol. 2, issue 2, 363-389

Abstract: Late modern empires managed multiple priorities for security and development that placed constraints on scarce financial resources. How did these regimes determine the allocation of their budgets given these competing priorities? This paper presents a game theory for imperial budget allocations and opposition rebellion. The main implication of the model is that a regime builds the state's repressive capacity before substantially funding public spending. Each policy improves the regime's security against opposition rebellion, but the regime prioritizes public spending over repression spending as the budget grows. The paper tests this main implication by first-difference models within eight individual regimes across the empires of Japan, Germany, the Ottoman State, and Brazil during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The results of the quantitative analysis are consistent with the hypothesis for most regimes. Regimes in which patterns of spending do not conform with theoretical expectations appear to have fewer political institutions and shorter institutional histories. The model should generalize to other empires of the time period, but may also apply to contemporary authoritarian regimes and potentially democracies as well.

Keywords: Public finance and budgeting; regime security; statebuilding; EITM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/115.00000033 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlhpe:115.00000033

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Historical Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().