IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_4884.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Democratic Window of Opportunity: Evidence from Riots in Sub-Saharan Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Toke Aidt
  • Gabriel Leon

Abstract

We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves towards democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact on democratic change, and supports the .window of opportunity. hypothesis: droughts lead to an increase in the threat of conflict, and incumbents often respond by making democratic concessions.

Suggested Citation

  • Toke Aidt & Gabriel Leon, 2014. "The Democratic Window of Opportunity: Evidence from Riots in Sub-Saharan Africa," CESifo Working Paper Series 4884, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4884
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp4884.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Quoc-Anh Doy & Filipe R. Campante, 2009. "Keeping Dictators Honest : the Role of Population Concentration," Governance Working Papers 22076, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research.
    2. Quoc-Anh Do & Filipe R. Campante, 2009. "Keeping Dictators Honest: the Role of Population Concentration," Working Papers 01-2009, Singapore Management University, School of Economics.
    3. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/7t0dp4mp8288lr2u6l7j8uk4li is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Nils B. Weidmann & Doreen Kuse & Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, 2010. "The Geography of the International System: The CShapes Dataset," International Interactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(1), pages 86-106, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aidt, Toke S. & Jensen, Peter S., 2014. "Workers of the world, unite! Franchise extensions and the threat of revolution in Europe, 1820–1938," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 52-75.
    2. Campante, Filipe R. & Chor, Davin, 2014. "“The people want the fall of the regime”: Schooling, political protest, and the economy," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 495-517.
    3. Farzanegan, Mohammad Reza & Witthuhn, Stefan, 2017. "Corruption and political stability: Does the youth bulge matter?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 47-70.
    4. Rainer Kotschy & Uwe Sunde, 2021. "Income Shocks, Inequality, and Democracy," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 123(1), pages 295-326, January.
    5. Aidt, T. S. & Leon, G. & Satchell, M., 2017. "The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Captain Swing Riots, 1830-31," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1751, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    6. Christian Almer & Jeremy Laurent-Lucchetti & Manuel Oechslin, 2014. "Agricultural shocks and riots: A disaggregated analysis," Department of Economics Working Papers 24/14, University of Bath, Department of Economics.
    7. Paul Maarek & Michael T. Dorsch, 2015. "Rent seeking, revolutionary threat and coups in non-democracies," THEMA Working Papers 2015-13, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    8. Michael Dorsch & Karl Dunz & Paul Maarek, 2015. "Macro shocks and costly political action in non-democracies," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 162(3), pages 381-404, March.
    9. Gerling, Lena, 2017. "Riots and the Window of Opportunity for Coup Plotters: Evidence on the Link between Urban Protests and Coups d’État," VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking 168054, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    10. Achim Ahrens, 2015. "Civil conflicts in Africa: Climate, economic shocks, nighttime lights and spill-over effects," SEEC Discussion Papers 1501, Spatial Economics and Econometrics Centre, Heriot Watt University.
    11. Gerling, Lena, 2017. "Riots and the window of opportunity for coup plotters: Evidence on the link between urban protests and coups d'état," CIW Discussion Papers 2/2017, University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW).
    12. Matthias Kalkuhl & Mekbib Haile & Lukas Kornher & Marta Kozicka, 2015. "Cost-benefit framework for policy action to navigate food price spikes. FOODSECURE Working Paper No 33," FOODSECURE Working papers 33, LEI Wageningen UR.
    13. Ahrens Achim, 2015. "Civil Conflicts, Economic Shocks and Night-time Lights," Peace Economics, Peace Science, and Public Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 21(4), pages 433-444, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Aidt, T. S. & Leon, G. & Satchell, M., 2017. "The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Captain Swing Riots, 1830-31," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1751, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    2. Rob Williams, 2022. "Turning the lights on to keep them in the fold: How governments preempt secession attempts," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 39(4), pages 422-446, July.
    3. Sheila M. Olmstead & Hilary Sigman, 2015. "Damming the Commons: An Empirical Analysis of International Cooperation and Conflict in Dam Location," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 2(4), pages 497-526.
    4. Hodler, Roland & Lechner, Michael & Raschky, Paul, 2020. "Reassessing the Resource Curse using Causal Machine Learning," CEPR Discussion Papers 15272, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Francesco Caselli & Massimo Morelli & Dominic Rohner, 2015. "The Geography of Interstate Resource Wars," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(1), pages 267-315.
    6. Hannah Smidt, 2020. "Mitigating election violence locally: UN peacekeepers’ election-education campaigns in Côte d’Ivoire," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 57(1), pages 199-216, January.
    7. Morelli, Massimo & Rohner, Dominic, 2015. "Resource concentration and civil wars," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 32-47.
    8. Dorsch, Michael T. & Maarek, Paul, 2018. "Rent extraction, revolutionary threat, and coups in non-democracies," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(4), pages 1082-1103.
    9. Sebastian Schutte & Claire Kelling, 2022. "A Monte Carlo analysis of false inference in spatial conflict event studies," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(4), pages 1-22, April.
    10. Johan Dittrich Hallberg, 2012. "PRIO Conflict Site 1989–2008: A Geo-Referenced Dataset on Armed Conflict," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 29(2), pages 219-232, April.
    11. Steve Pickering, 2016. "Introducing SpatialGridBuilder: A new system for creating geo-coded datasets," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 33(4), pages 423-447, September.
    12. Federica Genovese & Richard J. McAlexander & Johannes Urpelainen, 2023. "Institutional roots of international alliances: Party groupings and position similarity at global climate negotiations," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 329-359, April.
    13. Hinz, Julian, 2017. "The view from space: Theory-based time-varying distances in the gravity model," VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking 168270, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    14. Nicola Pestalozzi & Peter Cauwels & Didier Sornette, 2013. "Dynamics and Spatial Distribution of Global Nighttime Lights," Papers 1303.2901, arXiv.org.
    15. Scott J Cook & Cameron G Thies, 2021. "In plain sight? Reconsidering the linkage between brideprice and violent conflict1," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 38(2), pages 129-146, March.
    16. Hugh-Jones, David, 2010. "Interstate Competition and Political Stability," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 26, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    17. Ursula Daxecker, 2017. "Dirty Hands," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 61(6), pages 1261-1289, July.
    18. Olaf J de Groot & Carlos Bozzoli & Anousheh Alamir & Tilman Brück, 2022. "The global economic burden of violent conflict," Journal of Peace Research, Peace Research Institute Oslo, vol. 59(2), pages 259-276, March.
    19. Astrid Sneyers, 2017. "Food, Drought and Conflict Evidence from a Case-Study on Somalia," HiCN Working Papers 252, Households in Conflict Network.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    riots; drought; transitions; democracy; autocracy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4884. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.