Essays on the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays pertaining to the political economy of authoritarian rule. The first essay contributes a missing piece to the puzzle of the "Great Divergence" between Western Europe and East Asia by investigating the regularity of imperial cycles in East Asia. Combining game-theoretic arguments and historical analysis, it traces the region's authoritarian roots to structural asymmetries and the resulting millennial interactions between the nomadic and sedentary polities that give rise to bureaucratic empires in China. The second essay investigates the logic underlying revolutions and the consequences of authoritarian control. Through decision-theoretic models highlighting the micro-motives of revolutionary participation and the potentially nonlinear characteristics of revolutionary processes, it demonstrates the limitations and paradoxical effects of authoritarian control as manifested through its inter-temporal trade-offs, knowingly or unknowingly faced by an autocrat with bounded rationality and limited foresight. The third essay blends theories of international relations and comparative political economy by studying crisis bargaining under power asymmetry and connecting it to authoritarian politics. Framing intra-elite power-sharing and regional contentious politics under authoritarianism as crisis bargaining in a weak institutional environment, it reveals an overlooked mechanism through which the weak may offset power asymmetry in bargaining against the strong. This mechanism helps explain elite-led mass movements and within-regime variations of contentious politics under authoritarian rule.