Learning from Rebellion: How Workers Made the Developmental State

Why were some late industrializers more successful at industrialization than others? I ague that in countries where clientelism was absent, citizens organized larger and more frequent protests against their governments. These protests threatened governments, who then implemented a set of four policies to coopt their citizens: (1) early, universal secondary education; (2) government worker training programs; (3) creation of state-owned enterprises that adopted new technology and trained workers to use these technologies; (4) early creation of export processing zones. Threat of foreign invasion also scared rulers into adopting these policies because they made the potential for future protests more threating. When governments were afraid that neighboring countries would invade and remove them from power, they protected themselves by drafting citizens into their militaries. This made crackdowns more costly because citizens shot by their own governments could not be mobilized to fight. Therefore, governments could not disperse protests when they faced severe foreign threats and instead adopted the four policies to preempt protest.

I test this hypothesis with a combination of small-n qualitative case studies of South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore as well as a large-N quantitative analysis of pooled cross-section time-series data from 80 countries.