How and Why Dictators Forestall Democratization Using International Trade Policy

On 'how' dictatorships use international trade policy to forestall democratization, our theory endogenizes the threat of revolution in a dictatorship to a world food price shock. The dictatorship then aim to neutralize the threat and forestall democratization using trade taxes. On 'why', we show that if a dictatorship were to introduce domestic redistributive fiscal capacity, they would make it more difficult to forestall democratization, hence undermining their own rule. The data and econometric results show that dictatorships do indeed follow this logic, while liberal democracies behave differently. We also find 'partial democracies' behave like dictatorships and not like liberal democracies.