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Repress or Respect? Precarious Leadership, Poor Economy and Labor Protection

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Abstract

How should insecure leaders deal with labor rights in the face of an economic downturn? Economic theory suggests that suppressing labor rights boosts the economy and that economic growth also dampens violent political opposition. As a result, the suppression of labor rights should contribute to more job security for leaders. However, some other scholars maintain that more repression actually increases the probability of opposition. As a result, the policy implication of this argument is that leaders would be better off if they choose to improve the protection of labor rights. Our simple formal model demonstrates that the second argument is more likely to be the case. The probit analysis of 146 countries from 1984 to 2004 bears out this prediction. We also find that this relationship is stronger in non-democracies than in democracies. Our study appears to provide some support to Bueno de Mesquita et al.’s (2005) statement that policies that are good for political survival may not necessarily be good for the economy.

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Notes

  1. However, Li and Resnick’s statistical analysis reveals no such relationship between labor price and investment.

  2. But economic growth can also induce more repression. Rapid economic growth worsens inequality (Kuznets curve), and the government is thus more likely to engage in repression to prevent redistribution.

  3. We show the results using the data in its original form in the robustness checks. The results remain largely unchanged.

  4. We thank one of the reviewers for suggesting this test.

  5. For more detailed information on the data description, please see Mosley and Uno (2007, pp. 925-930).

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Acknowledgments

An early version of this paper was presented in ISA 2014, Toronto. The authors would like to thank David Cingranelli, Dave Clark, Seden Akcinaroglu, Solomon Polachek, Geoffrey Harris, two anonymous and participants in the World Politics Workshop at Binghamton University and ISA 2014 conference for their helpful comments and suggestions. All errors remain authors’ alone.

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  1. Department of Political Science, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, 19010, PA, USA

    Zhiyuan Wang

  2. Department of Political Science, Binghamton University, Binghamton, 13902, NY, USA

    Hyunjin Youn

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Correspondence to Zhiyuan Wang.

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Wang, Z., Youn, H. Repress or Respect? Precarious Leadership, Poor Economy and Labor Protection. Hum Rights Rev 18, 21–43 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-016-0428-0

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