3 - Regime-Contingent Biases and Sovereign Default, 1960–2009

Summary

This chapter provides support for my main hypotheses that more urban and food-importing autocracies should be more likely to default, whereas more rural and food-exporting democracies should be more likely to renege on their international financial obligations.Drawing on approximately 50 years of cross-national data, I demonstrate robust evidence in favor of my main theoretical expectations, which remain even after introducing an extensive battery of controls for additional country- and systemic-level alternative explanations.In addition, I show that, for the subset of countries with relevant data on subsidy costs, it is precisely the most rural-biased democracies, and most urban-biased autocracies, that are most likely to default on their debt.