The squeaky wheel gets the grease: Violent civil unrest and global social assistance provision.

ABSTRACT: What are the contemporary determinates of social assistance provision? What is the role of contentious politics? Social assistance literature is dominated by economic and demographic accounts, which under-examine the possibility that governments extend social assistance to contain social unrest. We test factors associated with these "structuralist" and "political" theories on a new panel dataset which includes 54 OECD and emerging market countries between 2002 and 2015. The results indicate social assistance coverage has a significant positive relationship with riots. We explain this outcome as policymakers expanding social assistance as a means of containing violent civil unrest. This effect is more significant in emerging markets, suggesting that the domination of structural explanations

SUBMITTER: Cemen R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9580367 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature