AUTHOR=Çemen Rahmi , Yörük Erdem TITLE=The squeaky wheel gets the grease: Violent civil unrest and global social assistance provision JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology VOLUME=7 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.891267 DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2022.891267 ISSN=2297-7775 ABSTRACT=

What are the contemporary determinates of social assistance provision? What is the role of contentious politics? Social assistance literature is dominated by economic and demographic accounts, which under-examine the possibility that governments extend social assistance to contain social unrest. We test factors associated with these “structuralist” and “political” theories on a new panel dataset which includes 54 OECD and emerging market countries between 2002 and 2015. The results indicate social assistance coverage has a significant positive relationship with riots. We explain this outcome as policymakers expanding social assistance as a means of containing violent civil unrest. This effect is more significant in emerging markets, suggesting that the domination of structural explanations is a result of sample bias toward the OECD. Finally, we find that governments consider World Bank social policy recommendations only insofar as there is violent unrest.