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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. <em>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.</em> 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 <em>"rentier"</em> 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.
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