Unlikely Democrats: Economic Elite Uncertainty Under Dictatorship and Support for Democratization

Victor Gay () and Michael Albertus

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economic elites, foreclosing the possibility that economic elites may at times prefer democracy absent a popular threat from below. Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we relax this assumption and examine how elite uncertainty about dictatorship -- a novel and generalizable causal mechanism impacting democratization -- can induce elite support for democracy. We construct a noisy signaling model in which a potential autocrat attempts to convince economic elites that he will be a faithful partner should elites install him in power. The model generates clear predictions about how two major types of elite uncertainty -- uncertainty in a potential autocratic successor's policies produced by variance in the pool of would-be dictator types, and uncertainty in the truthfulness of policy promises made by potential autocratic successors -- impact the likelihood of elite-driven democratization. We demonstrate the model's plausibility in a series of cases of democratic transition.

Keywords: Game theory; Comparative politics; Political economy; Democratization; Political elites; Economic elites; Formal methods; Dictatorships; Autocracies; Authoritarianism; Democratic transitions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 D83 N40 N46 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Journal Article: Unlikely Democrats: Economic Elite Uncertainty under Dictatorship and Support for Democratization (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:77567

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