Economic development and revolutions. A cross-national investigation

In the field of civil war studies, there is a consensus that the risk of war decreases as income increases. Nevertheless, such consensus has not been reached in the field of civil resistance and unarmed revolutions. This paper proposes a curvilinear framework positing two opposite trends in economic development. On the one hand, it increases the state resources for preventing illegal displacement and makes revolt costly for rebels. Conversely, it boosts resources needed for civil resistance. Utilizing independent sources on revolutions and employing parametric and non-parametric methods, we have identified robust support for the inverted “U-shape” relationship between income level and the risk of unarmed revolutions. This finding reconciles the discrepancies observed in previous studies and provides a different perspective on the “middle-income trap.”