Violent Repression as a Commitment Problem: Urbanization, Food Shortages, and Civilian Killings under Authoritarian Regimes

Ore Koren () and Bumba Mukherjee ()
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Ore Koren: Department of Political Science, Indiana University Bloomington and the Dickey Center for International Understanding, Dartmouth College
Bumba Mukherjee: Department of Political Science, Penn State University

No 296, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Authoritarian regimes frequently commit systematic killings of their own subjects, yet the mechanisms governing this behavioral shift remain unclear. We address this puzzle by developing a formal model that shows authoritarian elites perpetrate systematic killing campaigns preemptively in response to an exogenous shock where urban development levels are sufficiently high. In these contexts, the civilians cannot commit not to mobilize and pose a credible threat to the regime, which often preempts these efforts using systematic killings. Statistical analyses of a global high-resolution sample within all authoritarian states between 1996 and 2008 confirm the model’s predictions. This study thus explicates when elites would resort to systematic killing as a rationalist strategy, and identifies an important dynamic that explains geographical and temporal variations in systematic killings within authoritarian states.

Keywords: Mass killing; development; drought; geospatial analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 Q11 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:296

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