Keeping Dictators Honest: the Role of Population Concentration

Quoc-Anh Do and Filipe Campante

No 01-2009, Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics

Abstract: In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index of Spatial Concentration developed by Do & Campante (2008). The evidence supports our predictions: only in the sample of autocracies, population concentration around the capital city is positively associated with better governance and more redistribution (proxied by post-tax inequality), in OLS and IV regressions. Finally, we provide arguments to dismiss possible reverse causation as well as alternative, non-political economy explanations of such regularity, discuss the general applicability of our index and conclude with policy implications.

Keywords: Capital Cities; Gravity; Governance; Inequality; Redistribution; Population Concentration; Revolutions; Harmonic Functions; Axiomatics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 D31 D63 D74 J19 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2009-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

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