Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role of Population

• Main Authors: DO, Quoc-Anh, CAMPANTE, Filipe R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2009
• Subjects: Capital Cities; Gravity; Governance; Inequality; Redistribution; Population Concentration; Revolutions; Harmonic Functions; Axiomatics; Political Economy; Public Economics
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1135; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/2134/viewcontent/DoCampante2008NonDemoc_PopCon.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guarantee...