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Cited by 429

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity

·2011·Econometrica
DOI 10.3982/ecta8183
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Abstract

We show that democratic change may be triggered by transitory economic shocks. Our approach uses within-country variation in rainfall as a source of transitory shocks to sub-Saharan African economies. We find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. This result is consistent with the economic approach to political transitions, where transitory negative shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. 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.

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Metadata

Venue
Econometrica
Publisher
The Econometric Society
Published
2011
Volume
79
Issue
3
Pages
923-947
ISSN
0012-9682 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3982/ecta8183
OpenAlex
W3022000320
Cited by
429
References
7
FWCI
112.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3982/ecta8183
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Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity. (2011). Econometrica. https://doi.org/10.3982/ecta8183

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.