Violence when flush: commodity windfalls and the autocrat’s repertoire of repression

The third wave of autocratization is legalistic and gradual: today’s autocrats erode democracy with courts, laws, and spin rather than tanks. What makes a regime abandon the legalistic script and return to violence? We argue that money selects the repertoire. We combine the Democratic Erosion Event Dataset, which records 23,421 dated, classified, and targeted events across 156 countries, with a shift-share design that interacts fixed pre-period export baskets with world commodity prices, a world-price lottery no regime controls, to provide the first causal, event-level test of how income shocks recompose the repressive repertoire. Across 59 commodity-dependent non-liberal regimes (2000–2023), a one-standard-deviation windfall raises state activity against accountability by 5% and tilts its composition towards physical violence by 1.8 percentage points, about 7% of the mean, and away from legalistic-institutional tactics; busts run the substitution in reverse, symmetrically. The effect is contemporaneous and transitory, is driven by state-appropriable non-food commodities, and survives randomization inference; dissent does not respond, and the result replicates in an independently coded subcorpus. Legalism, the evidence suggests, is the constrained autocrat’s substitute, and commodity cycles are an anticipatable early-warning indicator of when erosion turns violent.