Non-Taxation and Representation: an Essay on Distribution, Redistribution, and Regime Stability in the Modern World
Abstract
Drawing upon formal modeling, cross-national statistical analysis, and in-depth case
studies, this dissertation explores the relationship between patterns of government
revenue generation and political regime stability. Considering both tax and non-tax
revenue (the latter of which includes foreign aid and revenue from state-owned natural
resource enterprises), and building on recent redistributive theories of regime change,
I use formal modeling to generate testable hypotheses about the impact of non-tax
revenue on regime dynamics in both democratic and authoritarian regimes. The central prediction is that rises (falls) in non-tax resources increase (decrease)
the stability of authoritarian and democratic regimes, by reducing (increasing) redistributional
conflicts in society. I provide evidence supporting the implications of the theory for both redistribution
and regime stability, drawing upon cross-national time-series statistical analysis
as well as in-depth examination of three theoretically important cases: Bolivia, Mexico,
and Kenya.The research has important implications for three bodies of literature.
First, it advances the broad literature on the political economy of redistribution.
The existing literature has generally assumed that government revenues are raised
solely by taxation, the source of redistributional conflict. I demonstrate that this
is not a plausible assumption---non-tax revenue makes up about a quarter of government
revenue on average, and in some countries represents the large majority of government
revenue---and that in fact non-tax revenue systematically decreases redistribution.Second,
building on this insight, I advance the literature on democratization by developing
a theory of how government revenues---both their size and their source---factor into
regime change. This work builds on and extends recent influential works that have
focused on formally modeling the distributional dynamics underlying regime transitions.
Finally, the research sheds light on commonalities between literatures studying different
areas of the world. In particular, it argues that there are similarities between
insights developed in the literature on the "rentier" state---principally regarding how oil revenues affect regime dynamics---and those
developed in the literature on foreign aid and political regimes. The reason is that
oil revenues and aid are significant examples of a broader set of resources---non-tax
revenues---whose importance has been underappreciated.
Type
DissertationDepartment
Political ScienceSubject
Political Science, GeneralDemocratization
Regime Transition
Redistribution
Oil
Foreign aid
Borrowing
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/440Citation
Morrison, Kevin McDonald (2007). Non-Taxation and Representation: an Essay on Distribution, Redistribution, and Regime
Stability in the Modern World. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/440.Collections
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