Revolt on the Nile: economic shocks, religion, and political power (Q2871447)

Using history as a guide, the author affirms that ``Nile shocks increased the religious leader's political influence by raising the probability he could coordinate a revolt''. This statement is fully consistent with the well-known proposition that economic crises increase the probability of the collapse of autocratic regimes by temporarily altering the balance of political power. On the one hand, Egypt is a mostly agrarian country and therefore economic crises are directly defined by Nile shocks and, as consequence, crop failure and a drop of quality of life. On the other hand, it is known that in extraordinary situations the influence of any religious authority is strengthened (especially in Muslim countries); but there is a question pro or contra how sovereign this factor will work.NEWLINENEWLINE In fact, the paper is a logical and statistical justification of the above mentioned statements based on a large amount of interesting historical data. In Section 1.2, the author suggests that an increasing of the political power of the head judge can lead to ``equilibrium decrease in the judge replacement probability.'' Based on a formal estimate of the relationship between judge replacement and Nile shock (regression equation), in Section 2.2 the author concludes that ``it indicates an `unwinding' of concessions given to head judge during Nile floods after the threat of Nile-induced unrest had subsided or it is possible that this result is a false positive.'' Then, the author statistically proves that allocations for religious structures have been increased in critical periods, but limited ``to the `impact' year.'' In the final part of the paper, the author investigates ``the extent to which some of the most plausible interpretations of the results are consistent with available empirical evidence.'' Four positions are studied: increase in religiosity, decrease in replacement probability, external wars, and political power of religious leaders. A measure of religiosity is constructed which reduces to a regression equation. The results provide ``that Nile-induced increases in religiosity are not driving the result.'' As a second item the results are obtained by running the regression equation on the data before and after 1169.NEWLINENEWLINE Result: ``Nile shocks did not decrease the replacement probabilities of all judges''. External wars: it is clear that Nile shocks can increase the probability of conflicts. But the result shows that the importance of Nile-induced external wars is low. Is it an increase of the political power of religious leaders? In order to answer this question the author has no relevant data, but he states ``the metric that measures the extent to which Maqrizi refers to high food prices in each year''. The author shows that ``high prices led to a 30\% point decrease in the judge replacement probability.'' Thus, from this paper we have some of the most plausible alternatives of the revolt on the Nile, explained on the base of empirical patterns.