Ethnic Diversity, Public Spending and Political Regimes

Ghosh, Sugata and Mitra, Anirban (2018) Ethnic Diversity, Public Spending and Political Regimes. Working paper. To be resubmitted to Social Choice and Welfare (Submitted) (Full text available)

Abstract

We study the relationship between ethnic diversity and public spending under two different political regimes, namely, democracy and dictatorship. We build a theory where political leaders (democratically elected or not) decide on the allocation of spending on different types of public goods: a general public good and an ethnically-targetable public good. We show that the relationship between public spending and ethnic diversity is qualitatively different under the two regimes. In particular, higher ethnic diversity leads to greater investment in general rather than group-specific public goods under democracy; the opposite relation obtains under dictatorship. We also discuss some implications of our results for economic performance and citizen's welfare.

Item Type:	Monograph (Working paper)
Uncontrolled keywords:	Ethnic diversity, Public goods, Democracy, Dictatorship, Economic performance
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Divisions:	Faculties > Social Sciences > School of Economics
Depositing User:	Anirban Mitra
Date Deposited:	29 Nov 2018 23:28 UTC
Last Modified:	30 Nov 2018 15:22 UTC
Resource URI:	https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/70467 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)
Mitra, Anirban:	https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6297-1361