Opportunistic Political Cycles in Belarus: An explanation to why dictatorship works

Sammanfattning: The study of the prevalence of dictatorial regimes has long been at the forefront of political science, but it is only recently that it has risen to prominence also within economic research. To date, the main economic explanations of dictatorship center on the distributions of economic rents across groups, i.e. from an autocrat to a societal elite. In contrast, this study extends the theory of opportunistic political cycles from its traditional democratic domain to explore how broad material redistributions across time may be used to perpetuate dictatorship. Employing a case study of the Belarusian political economy, we develop a formal model of opportunistic political cycles in an authoritarian setting and use econometric testing to examine empirically whether or not its implications are present in modern day Belarus. Our results support the conclusion that the government deliberately induces political cyclicality in real average wages and real average pensions and yield tentative evidence of a political cycle in real GDP. The cycles are predominantly driven by strong countercyclicality in inflation, which in turn is achieved through extensive state control over prices. Thus, we conclude that opportunistic political cycles contribute to the perpetuation of autocracy in Belarus.