Shall we riot too? The geographical neighbor impact on political instability

This paper investigates the impact of regional political instability on the political instability of a country. Our identification strategy relies on the spatial nature of international relations. We use the characteristics of the neighbors’ neighbors as the instruments for the neighbors’ political instability and regional dummies to control for common regional shocks. We show that political instability in neighbor countries has a strong positive impact on a given country’s political instability. The average of neighbors’ population size appears to be a significant mediating factor behind this relationship.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Grechyna, D. (2018) Shall We Riot Too? The Geographical Neighbor Impact on Political Instability. Kyklos, 71: 581–612. https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12187., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/kykl.12187. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.