A pervasive and pernicious feature of public policy in developing countries is its tendency to display urban bias: to favor cities over the countryside in redistribution and the provision of public goods. This has been found to be particularly true for agricultural pricing policy, where governments have been seen to keep food prices low to favor urban food consumers at the expense of rural farmers. In this seminar, I will present a chapter of my book project which explores the logic of agricultural and food policy across regime type. I test whether increases in food taxes lead to higher rates of urban political unrest under authoritarian regimes. To do so, I use a dataset on consumer food taxes and urban mobilization which covers the entire developing world from 1960-2010. I find that food taxes are associated with urban political unrest, but only under permissive political opportunity structures associated with intermediate levels of democracy.

About the presenter:

Henry Thomson is an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the political economy of authoritarianism and democratization. He has a special interest in role which agriculture plays in processes of development and democratization. He has published articles on variation in agricultural policy across political regime type and the role of landholding inequality in promoting civil conflict and authoritarian repression. He is also interested in collective mobilization and repression under authoritarian regimes. From 2014-2017, he was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin. His doctoral dissertation won the 2015 Juan Linz Prize for the Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democratization from the American Political Science Association and his 2016 article on landholding inequality and civil conflict won the Best Paper in International Relations Award from the Midwest Political Science Association. He teaches classes in Comparative Politics, Political Economy and International Relations.