Semuhi Sinanoglu with Lucan Way & Steven Levitsky (2025). “Resource concentration and autocratic resilience.” Working paper. Includes an original dataset.
An original index of statist resource concentration and its effect on autocratic survival, 1970 to 2023.
How does resource concentration impact regime survival? On the one hand, the concentration of resources in government hands may allow dictators to weaken independent economic actors, bind large numbers to the state through the provision of attractive public employment, and facilitate efforts to impoverish, coopt, or divide organized opposition. On the other hand, high-level state involvement in the economy may render autocrats liable for a country’s economic woes and aggravate the economic loss of the incumbent elite during economic downturns, leading to higher rates of defection. To test these ideas, we created an original index of resource concentration that includes a variety of measures for the relative size of the government/private sector, state’s coercive control over the economy, and poverty and underdevelopment with a country-year-level dataset from 1970-2023. We show that higher levels of statist resource concentration significantly boost regime survival, controlled for the level of institutionalization. The findings have significant implications for understanding structural/political economy factors behind regime durability.