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Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity

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  • Markus Brückner
  • Antonio Ciccone

Abstract

According to the economic approach to political transitions, transitory negative economic shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Testing the theory requires a source of transitory shocks to the aggregate economy. We use rainfall shocks in Sub-Saharan African countries and find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent, democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage points and the probability of a democratic transition increases by 1.3 percentage points.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by FEDEA in its series Working Papers with number 2009-38.

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Date of creation: Dec 2009
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Handle: RePEc:fda:fdaddt:2009-38

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  27. repec:fth:prinin:455 is not listed on IDEAS
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