Eighth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

How do democracies and autocracies respond to rising food prices? The literature on democratic redistribution implies that rising food prices increase the poor’s demands for redistribution of income from the rich. In a democracy, the poor vote for more redistribution of income from the rich to the poor to compensate for the poor’s higher loss of real income that results from Engel’s law. Then, for an authoritarian regime not to be overthrown, it must at least match the compensation obtained by the poor from the rich in a democracy. Our model shows that an authoritarian regime will be more likely overthrown when the authoritarian elite represents fewer rich. Implicit to the model are two hypotheses: First, food price inflation causes more food insecurity in authoritarian than in democratic regimes, and, second, authoritarian regimes are more likely to be overthrown than democracies when confronted with food price inflation. We provide empirical evidence for both hypotheses.