The Price of Silence: Fiscal Capacity and Mass Anti-Regime Mobilization in Autocracies

Why do some autocracies experience violent anti-regime mobilization while others remain quiescent? The literature does not provide sufficient theoretical arguments and empirical evidence linking fiscal strength in autocracies to mass mobilization. In my paper, I suggest that fiscal capacity shapes authoritarian stability: autocracies with greater fiscal room can finance public goods, the military and security apparatus at high levels, solving the fundamental problem of authoritarian control and power-sharing. Moreover, higher fiscal capacity increases protest costs for citizens, which constitutes a "silence-buying" effect, a new term I coin in the context of authoritarian civil resistance. My argument stems from some comparative politics theories and theoretical statements of Jack Goldstone and Theda Skocpol. Using panel data on violent mass anti-regime mobilization from 2003 to 2022 and introducing a novel operationalization of fiscal capacity as central government debt, I employ logistic models for protest onset and negative binomial models for protest counts to estimate the effect of the central government debt on violent contention. Across specifications, robustness checks and zero-inflation corrections, the effect stays significantly positive, suggesting that fiscal constraints pose a destabilizing threat to autocracies. Findings show that fiscal capacity has been overlooked as a viable factor of contention and provide sufficient evidence in favor of a new operationalization of fiscal capacity.