Education, neopatrimonialism, and revolutions

Raouf Boucekkine (raouf.boucekkine@univ-amu.fr), Rodolphe Desbordes (desbordes@ires.ucl.ac.be) and Paolo Melindi-Ghidi
Additional contact information
Rodolphe Desbordes: SKEMA Business School

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: The occurrence of some revolutionary episodes seems initially puzzling. For example, before the 'Arab Spring', macroeconomic conditions were improving, the political leaders had been in power for a long time, and the autocrats had shown an apparent interest in the welfare of their population by investing in human capital. We argue that such a paradox can be solved by considering that high education levels are incompatible with the features characterising strong neopatrimonial states. We develop this intuition in a simple theoretical model and we test our prediction in a sequential empirical study of regime changes and regime breakdowns in a large panel of countries. We indeed find that a regime change is more likely in countries combining high neopatrimonialism and high education levels. Moreover, when a regime change happens under these circumstances, a revolution is the most likely type of regime breakdown. These results help to understand the 'Arab Spring' but are not specific to the Arab world.

Keywords: education; neopatrimonialism; regime breakdown; regime change; revolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02613158
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-02613158/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Education, neopatrimonialism, and revolutions (2020)
Working Paper: Education, Neopatrimonialism and Revolutions (2020)
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:hal:wpaper:halshs-02613158

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD (hal@ccsd.cnrs.fr).