FISCAL CAPACITY AND REVOLUTIONARY DESTABILIZATION. A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2218-1067-2026-2-15-27Keywords:
fiscal capacity, political instability, revolutions, maximalist campaigns, government debt, protests, civil resistanceAbstract
This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal stability and revolutionary onsets. Classic researchers of revolutions, such as Jack Goldstone, have provided theoretical arguments for the importance of fiscal factors, but any substantial quantitative cross-national large-n research has not been conducted yet. Logistic regression analysis with an interaction term that we have performed confirms our main hypotheses that a relationship between government debt and revolutionary onset likelihood is not uniform and depends on the levels of economic development and type of revolutionary instability. We use NAVCO 1.3 and HSE University Centre for Stability and Risk Analysis datasets as our main data sources. The results show that in developing economies, rising government debt is associated with a higher likelihood of armed revolution onset, while in developed economies, the relationship is negative. For unarmed revolutions, there are no significant differences between developing and developed economies. Such results are explained by different logics of government debt increase – developed countries increase government debt to differentiate budget policy, whilst for developing economies, increases in government debt indicate accumulated economic issues. Besides, empirical results show that an increased budget burden undermines developing countries' capacities to finance security apparatus, army, and maintain elite loyalty, provoking armed revolutions.
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