PAD Seminar: 'Income Growth and Revolutions'

Lecture highlights

Does income growth affect the probabilities of attempted and successful revolution? This paper presents and discusses various theoretical arguments on the effects of long-term and short-term growth on revolution. Thereafter, the paper conducts an empirical analysis. The results show that low short-term growth significantly increases the probabilities of both attempted and successful revolution. Although there is some evidence that higher income levels reduce probability of revolution attempts, this result is not robust; and closer inspection indicates that a potential effect may be due to the effect of oil and gas income more specifically. There is no net effect of income level on successful revolution, but high income reduces the probability of successful revolutions more in democracies than in dictatorships. The paper also investigates Davies’ (1962) J-curve hypothesis and Gurr’s (1970) decremental deprivation hypothesis. Although revolution occurs more frequently after J-curves and decremental deprivation patterns, this is due to economic crises and not the more complex patterns as hypothesized by Davies and Gurr.

About our guest

Carl Henrik Knutsen is Postdoc at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. He has published articles among others in Journal of Development Studies, Electoral Studies, International Interactions, International Political Science Review, European Political Science Review and Busines and Politics, and is co-editor of Governing the Global Economy (Routledge, 2011) and Governance and Knowledge: The Politics of Foreign Investment, Technology and Ideas (Routledge, forthcoming).

Interested?

All are welcome! Please register with an e-mail to u.b.wethal@sum.uio.no.