@techreport{Apolte2010there,
abstract = {In this paper the political economy of revolutions is revisited, as it has been developed and applied in a number of publications by Acemoglu and Robinson. We criticize the fact that these authors abstract from collective-action problems and focus on inequality of income or wealth instead. In doing so, they reanimate a long but misleading tradition in social sciences, namely to directly deduct prospective group behavior from the collective interest of a group. We show that, because of collective-action problems, income inequality is not a sufficient condition for a revolution to occur. Furthermore, we also show that inequality does not even need to be a necessary condition, since all what is needed in order for a group to be interested in a revolution is that this group as a whole can expect to be a beneficiary of a revolution. For the latter to apply, however, inequality is not necessary. Hence, not inequality but rather a certain structure of commitment devices or their absence is crucial for explaining why revolutions sometimes occur and sometimes not.},
address = {M\"{u}nster},
author = {Thomas Apolte},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {D72; D74; O15; P16; 330; Credible Commitments; Dictatorship; Political Economy; Redistribution},
language = {eng},
number = {29},
publisher = {CAWM},
title = {Why is there no revolution in North-Korea? The political economy of revolution revisited},
type = {CAWM discussion paper / Centrum f\"{u}r Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung M\"{u}nster},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/51364},
year = {2010}
}
