All in the Family: Why Non-Democratic Leaders Have More Children
Document Type
Article
Department
Economics (CMC)
Publication Date
2008
Abstract
Economists have come to learn that politics matters. But survival matters the most to those involved in politics. We provide a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders, fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic. This empirical relationship is established controlling for a full array of country specific as well as individual specific variables. Our finding also continues to hold when using alternative measures of family size.
Rights Information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag
Terms of Use & License Information
DOI
10.1007/s10101-007-0039-y
Recommended Citation
Beckett, Dustin and Gregory Hess. "All in the Family: Why Non-Democratic Leaders Have More Children." Economics of Governance 9.1 (2008): 65-85. DOI: 10.1007/s10101-007-0039-y
