Seminar with Neil Ketchley

Title of presentation: "Anti-Austerity Riots in Late Developing States: Evidence from the 1977 Egyptian Bread Intifada" ( a joint work with Ferdinand Eibl and Jeroen Gunning, both Department of Political Economy, King's College London)

Abstract

Empirical investigation of rioting points to the importance of out group grievances, but is confined to OECD countries. We expand the universe of cases to examine anti-austerity rioting in late developing authoritarian regimes, where populists create support coalitions through the expansion of formalized employment. We present an augmented moral economy model of rioting where labor market segmentation makes insiders more likely to riot when confronted with austerity measures. This is tested with the case of Egypt during the 1977 Bread Intifada. To conduct our analysis we match an event catalog derived from Arabic-language media accounts with disaggregated census data enumerated in the weeks before the 1977 Bread Intifada. Spatial models are used to disentangle the importance of a district's labor force from its location. As our theory predicts, opposition to austerity measures was especially intense in districts with more employment in formal, insider sectors, and these results hold after accounting for the focal qualities of collective action, proximate deprivation, backlash from state repression, the presence of a university campus, and local leftist organizations.

Published Sep. 9, 2019 1:14 PM - Last modified Nov. 28, 2019 10:13 AM