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The Impact of Income on the Taste for Revolt
Author(s) -
MacCulloch Robert
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00104.x
Subject(s) - microdata (statistics) , endogeneity , demographic economics , economics , quarter (canadian coin) , quartile , per capita , per capita income , development economics , geography , econometrics , demography , sociology , population , statistics , mathematics , archaeology , census , confidence interval
The question of how the level of development affects revolutionary support in society is of fundamental importance. One approach to provide an answer has been to study the relationship between actual civil conflict and income at the national level. This article takes a different approach. It uses microdata sets based on surveys of revolutionary support across one‐quarter of a million people and identifies how the responses vary with their incomes. We find that a rise in GDP of $US 1,600 per capita in 2001 values decreases the chances of supporting revolt by 2.4 percentage points which represents a 41% drop in the proportion of people wanting a revolution. For a person who jumps from the bottom to top income quartile within their country, the probability declines by a similar amount. The results are robust to controlling for country and year effects, country‐specific time trends and take account of the potential endogeneity of GDP.