All in the family: why non-democratic leaders have more children |
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Authors: | Dustin Beckett Gregory D Hess |
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Institution: | (1) California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA;(2) Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA, USA;(3) CESifo, Munich, Germany;(4) Department of Economics, Claremont McKenna College, 500 E. Ninth St., Bauer Center, Claremont, CA 91711, USA |
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Abstract: | Economists have come to learn that politics matters. But survival matters the most to those involved in politics. We provide
a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a
child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic
leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate
rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct
a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders,
fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic.
This empirical relationship is established controlling for a full array of country specific as well as individual specific
variables. Our finding also continues to hold when using alternative measures of family size.
This paper has been prepared for a conference honoring Herschel I. Grossman at Brown University in April of 2006. We thank
our discussant, Murat Iyigun, an anonymous referee, Michelle Garfinkel and conference participants for excellent suggestions. |
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Keywords: | D72 H1 J13 |
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