Nontax Revenue, Social Cleavages, and Authoritarian Stability in Mexico and Kenya: “Internationalization, Institutions, and Political Change” Revisited

What determines how authoritarian regimes use internationally attained revenues such as natural resource rents to stay in power? The answer, this article argues, lies partly in the nature of the socioeconomic cleavages in the country. The article presents a comparison of Kenya and Mexico, two countries that experienced similar rises and falls in internationally derived nontax revenue in the context of similar political regimes. The countries differed, however, in their socioeconomic cleavages: In Mexico, cleavages were along sectoral or class lines, whereas in Kenya they were along ethnic lines. The author demonstrates how these differences led governments in the countries to use nontax revenues in different ways, with important consequences in particular for social spending. Despite the recent turn in the resource curse literature emphasizing domestic contextual factors, socioeconomic cleavages have been relatively ignored. The findings here begin to fill that gap, with important implications for several literatures.