Cities, Redistribution, and Authoritarian Regime Survival

Urban geography and protest mobilization in Africa

“…While this yields only 4 observations per country we prefer fewer observations over an artificially inflated dataset employing interpolated values, which can bias results. In column 1 we present the most parsimonious model mirroring Wallace (2013). In contrast to his results we find no effect within countries and a negative and significant effect between countries.…”

“…Theoretically, the association between a country s level of urbanization and contentious collective action is ambiguous. From a resource mobilization perspective, population concentration mitigates the perennial time-distance costs associated with coordinating collective action thereby making it easier to organise a protest and hence increasing the probability of such an event (Sewell 2001; see also Walton and Ragin 1990;Glaeser and DiPasquale 1998;Herbst 2009;Staniland 2010;Wallace 2013). In more urbanized countries there may also be a lower probability of being detected or punished by a repressive political regime than in a less urbanized country, which might reduce the opportunity costs of participation.…”

“…By contrast, Wallace (2013) The inconsistency of results across studies is likely due to different models and somewhat dependent variables. Wallace (2013Wallace ( , 2014 only controls for GDP per capita and GDP growth. Such a parsimonious model is problematic given the potential for omitted variable bias.…”

Urban productivity in the developing world

“…Carp (2007) shows the role of urban connectivity in enabling the coordinated efforts of the American Revolution. Wallace (2013) shows empirically that urbanization increases the probability of regime change for dictators: among dictatorial regimes, a one log point increase in the size of the largest city increases the number of regime changes by…”

It Is All about Political Incentives: Democracy and the Renewable Feed-in Tariff

“…Notwithstanding urban bias in developing countries, both classic (Bates, 1981;Varshney, 1995) and recent studies (Bezemer and Headey, 2008;Wallace, 2013;Kim and Urpelainen, 2015) show that this bias is much more severe in autocracies than in democracies.…”