http://www.antoniociccone.eu/wp- ... democratization.pdf

Rain and the Democratic
Window of Opportunity
by
Markus Brückner and Antonio Ciccone*
October 2009
Abstract. According to the economic approach to political
transitions, transitory negative economic shocks can open a window
of opportunity for democratic improvement. Testing the theory
requires a source of transitory shocks to the aggregate economy. We
use rainfall shocks in Sub-Saharan African countries and find that
negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in
democratic institutions. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that
following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent,
democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage points and the
probability of a democratic transition increases by 1.3 percentage
points.