State Capacity, Enfranchisement, and Commodity Shocks

• In Event: Historical Taxation and Representation: Actors and Institutions

Abstract

Natural resource commodity booms are revenue windfalls that provide resource-rich nations the opportunity to improve their fiscal capacity and their nations' distributive strategies. Yet only a subset of nations appear able to employ those resources to increase tax revenue, shrink inequalities, and retract sectoral subsidies. We provide a theory to explain nations' current distributive strategies by the sequencing of investment in state capacity and the expansion of popular suffrage, and test our argument using a difference-in-difference design that leverages international price shocks on countries' export portfolios.

Authors

• Victoria Paniagua, London School of Economics

• Pablo Beramendi, Duke University

• Melissa Ziegler Rogers, Claremont Graduate University