Will a government find it financially easier to neutralize a looming protest if more groups are involved?

Oded Stark and Ewa Zawojska

Constitutional Political Economy, 2016, vol. 27, issue 4, No 5, 435-450

Abstract: Abstract We study a policy response to an increase in post-merger social stress. If a merger of groups of people is viewed as a revision of their social space, then the merger alters people’s comparators and increases social stress: the social stress of a merged population is greater than the sum of the levels of social stress of the constituent populations when apart. We use social stress as a proxy measure for looming social protest. As a response to the post-merger increase in social stress, we consider a policy aimed at reversing the negative effect of the merger by bringing the social stress of the merged population back to the sum of the pre-merger levels of social stress of the constituent populations when apart. We present, in the form of an algorithm, a cost-effective policy response which is publicly financed and does not reduce the incomes of the members of the merged population. We then compare the financial cost of implementing such a policy when the merger involves more or fewer groups. We show that the cost may fall as the number of merging groups rises.

Keywords: Merger of populations; Revision of social space; Aggregate relative deprivation; Social stress; A cost-effective policy response (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D04 D63 F55 H53 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-016-9221-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Will a government find it financially easier to neutralize a looming protest if more groups are involved? (2016)
Working Paper: Will a government find it financially easier to neutralize a looming protest if more groups are involved? (2016)
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:kap:copoec:v:27:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1007_s10602-016-9221-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-016-9221-y

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().