What makes a revolution?

Robert MacCulloch

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Although property rights are the cornerstone of capitalist economics, throughout history existing claims have been frequently overturned and redefined by revolution. A fundamental question for economists is what makes revolutions more likely to occur. A large literature has found contradictory evidence for the effect of income and income inequality on revolt, possibly owing to omitted variable bias. The primary innovation of the paper is to tackle this problem by introducting a new panel data set derived from surveys of revolutionary support across one-quarter of a million randomly sampled individuals. This allows one to control for unobserved fixed effects. The regressions are based on a choice-theoretic model of revolt. After controlling for personal characteristics, country and year fixed effects, more people are found to favour revolt when inequality is high and their net incomes are low. A policy that decreases inequality equivalent to a shift from the US to Luxemburg is predicted to decrease support for revolt by 7.7 percentage points. A decrease of net income of $US 3,510 (in 1985 constant dollars) increases revolutionary support by the same amount. The results indicate that 'going for growth', or implementing policies that reduce inequality, can buy nations out of revolt.

Keywords: Property Rights; Revolts; Income Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D31 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2001-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6649/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Makes a Revolution? (2001)
Working Paper: What makes a revolution? (1999)
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:ehl:lserod:6649

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().