Record Details

Institutional Change as a Response to Unrealized Threats

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Institutional Change as a Response to Unrealized Threats
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/E6IARM
 
Creator Smith, Alastair M.
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Leaders shift political institutions to ameliorate threats to their tenure. The masses might rebel to replace the leader and change institutions. Disloyalty by political insiders might result in a coup. Leaders liberalize when the masses present a greater threat and `autocratize' to dissipate threats from elites. A two-step procedure tests these arguments: 1) The risks of revolution and coup are estimated as a function of leader health, experience, economic conditions and extant institutions. 2) These risks are used to predict institutional change in a heteroskedastic regression model. The magnitude and direction of institutional change depends upon whether the masses or elites pose the greater threat. When both risks are high, leaders must gamble as to which risk they believe is greatest. In such circumstances, institutions are highly volatile even as the aggregate direction of change becomes unclear
 
Subject Social Sciences
instability
revolution
coup
institutional change
 
Contributor Smith, Alastair M.