Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity

Markus Brückner and Antonio Ciccone

No 2009-38, Working Papers from FEDEA

Abstract: According to the economic approach to political transitions, transitory negative economic shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Testing the theory requires a source of transitory shocks to the aggregate economy. We use rainfall shocks in Sub-Saharan African countries and find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent, democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage points and the probability of a democratic transition increases by 1.3 percentage points.

Date: 2009-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://documentos.fedea.net/pubs/dt/2009/dt-2009-38.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity (2011)
Working Paper: Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity (2010)
Working Paper: Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity (2010)
Working Paper: Rain and the democratic window of opportunity (2009)
Working Paper: Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity (2008)
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:fda:fdaddt:2009-38

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from FEDEA
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carmen Arias ().