Нестабильность демократии в странах, богатых ресурсами

Instability of Democracy in Resource Abundant Countries

Victor Polterovich, Vladimir Popov and Alexander Tonis
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Виктор Меерович Полтерович

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We analyze data on sustainability of democratic regimes in resource rich countries and suggest a two-period model to explain why resource abundance may lead to instability of democracy in some countries, but does not create any difficulties for democratic system in other ones. Our central idea is as follows. If a country is abundant by point resources, this creates a prerequisite for resource owners to have dominant economic power. If institutions are weak under democracy, the economic power may be converted into political one. Resource owners («oligarchs») can thrust their preferred decisions on a parliament, bribing politicians. This creates a base for a potential Autocrat's strategy to get power. Rate of resource rent tax is considered as the only policy instrument in our simple model. The tax affects the income of a representative voter. Choosing a tax rate, Autocrat competes with conventional Politician (a representative political party) for the office. Our model takes into account the fact that the actual Autocrat's policy may be different from the announced one. If the difference between the two policies is big, then the public may rise up and throw the Autocrat down. Our main conclusions from the model exploration are as follows. The probability of democracy preservation is decreasing in the amount of resources, if the institutional quality is low enough. It is independent of resources and is determined only by cultural characteristics of the society, if the institutional quality is higher than the threshold. The level of the threshold, however, is positively dependent on the resource amount. These effects are consequences of the optimal Autocrat policy: the larger is the amount of resources, the stronger are Oligarch's incentives (inspired by Autocrat's policy) to bribe politicians.

Keywords: resource abundance; resource curse; democracy; autocracy; elections; political stability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in HSE Economic Journal 2.12(2008): pp. 176-200

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/22840/1/MPRA_paper_22840.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Нестабильность демократии в странах, богатых ресурсами (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:pra:mprapa:22840

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().