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Arms Technology and the Coercive Imbalance Outside Western Europe

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

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Title Arms Technology and the Coercive Imbalance Outside Western Europe
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TZ9PSJ
 
Creator Hariri, Jacob Gerner
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Many scholars consider the bargaining power between ruler and society to be one
of the most important determinants of a country's political regime and institutions.
The relative bargaining power is shaped, i.a., by arms technology and societal modernization: arms tend to strengthen rulers, and modernization tends to strengthen
society. We document that rulers outside of Western Europe were strengthened by
advanced arms technology at a time when societies were weakly modernized and
political demands limited. We dub this ’the coercive imbalance’ and argue that it
has shaped the state-society bargain outside Western Europe since at least 1850.
We show that the coercive imbalance arose because arms diffuse faster than civilian
technology. We then use OLS, system GMM, and 2SLS to document that the
adoption of advanced arms technology at an early stage of societal modernization
is strongly associated with limited democracy, poor bureaucracy, and corruption.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Comparative Politics, political development, Arms diffusion, political regimes, military technology
 
Date 2023-08-02
 
Contributor Hariri, Jacob Gerner