Elsevier

Economics Letters

Volume 79, Issue 1, April 2003, Pages 7-13
Economics Letters

The taste for revolt

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-1765(02)00269-0Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper tests for the characteristics affecting the revolutionary preferences of over 200,000 randomly sampled individuals from surveys taken over the 1970s to 1990s. The chances of supporting revolt are higher if young, lower in the income distribution or unemployed. There are strong differences across ideological lines. For people identifying with the religious right, falling from the top to bottom income quartile increases the probability of supporting revolt by 2 percentage points whereas falling unemployed has no effect. For those identifying with the non-religious left both events increase the probability of supporting revolt by at least 5 percentage points.

Introduction

A fundamental requirement of market economies is the security of ownership claims to property.1 Yet historically existing claims to property have been regularly challenged by revolts. Attempts at revolt have often failed. Revolutionary tastes arising from the objective situation may not translate into actions leading to a successful revolt due to the free-rider problem that undermines collective action (see Olson, 1965).2 This may have contributed to the difficulty identifying factors associated with revolt in cross-country empirical studies whose dependent variable is the actual occurrence (or not) of political violence and mass uprisings.3

This paper takes an alternative approach. It focuses on new evidence from a survey data set that asks people directly whether they want existing structures to be overturned by revolt and tests for the effects of age, employment status and relative income position. Since these variables may be correlated with a person’s value of time and human capital they can influence attitudes purely for rational economic reasons (see Becker and Stigler, 1977). However ideological perspective, formed by a person’s perceptions of fairness and social justice, may also play a role in shaping attitudes toward the existing system (see North, 1981). Hence the paper also tests for the importance of ideology by dividing the sample across religious and party political lines.

Section snippets

The empirical model

The following regression is estimated across 12 European nations from 1976 to 1990:TASTE for REVOLT?ictgg MICROictgcgtgictgwhere TASTE for REVOLT?ictg is a dummy taking the value 1 when individual, i, in country, c, and year, t, agrees with the statement that ‘The entire way our society is organised must be radically changed by revolutionary action’. The superscript, g, refers to the fact that we consider the full sample (in which case g=full sample) but also divide it along two

Revolt data and results

Averaged across the 201,940 people in the full sample, the proportion supporting revolt is 5.9 percentage points. It is 3.4 percentage points for the religious and right-wing group and 12.8 percentage points for the non-religious and left-wing group. Table A.1 reports more descriptive statistics. It shows that 83% of the sample declare themselves ‘religious’ (for left-wingers it is 77% and for right-wingers it is 91%).5

Conclusion

Obtaining estimates of the determinants of the security of property rights has proved difficult, possibly because revolutionary tastes may not translate into observed (collective) action. The release of large-scale survey data sets enables us to explain underlying tastes. This paper finds that one’s chances of supporting revolt are higher for the young, unemployed and those who are lower in the income distribution. The size and significance of the latter two effects differ strongly across

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