College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Foreign Direct Investment in Authoritarian States(2023) Englund, Chase Coleman; Allee, Todd; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I examine autocracies and demonstrate why some autocratic regimes attract considerable investment whereas others do not. I advance two primary claims. The first is that autocratic regimes in which there is political competition actually receive less FDI than those in which there is less competition. Autocratic states tend to have weak institutional protections for investors, which causes greater uncertainty for businesses that fear costly policy changes. Therefore, when political competition in autocracies is greater, investors become more cautious and FDI inflows decline. The second claim is that FDI is more targeted to certain sectors in autocratic states with less political competition. This is because autocratic leaders seek to use FDI as a private good to favor members of their winning coalition. Therefore, autocrats with smaller coalitions (i.e., less political competition) will use policy to steer the benefits of FDI more narrowly. This is important because the use of FDI as a private good in this way tends to entrench authoritarianism. In analyzing both claims, I also examine the relative number of economic elites in a state, which I argue is an important and fundamental indicator of competition over policy (alongside the political measures), because it determines the size of an autocrat’s winning coalition. I find strong support for both of these hypotheses, using a wide range of novel data that I have compiled from several unique sources and various private organizations. I examine the volume and sectoral concentration of FDI in thousands of cases involving more than 100 non-democratic states over a 42-year period, beginning in 1980. In order to measure foreign investors’ perceptions of the policy environment in nondemocratic states, I also utilize data from an automated textual analysis of quarterly earnings calls of publicly traded firms located in authoritarian settings. Even after controlling for other factors, I first find that greater political competition is associated with greater perception of risk by foreign investors and lower FDI inflows. To measure the number of economic elites relative to economic activity, I employ a novel measure of stock market concentration that estimates the degree to which a market is either oligarchic or diversified. These results are important and timely because many of the largest recipients of FDI globally are now autocratic states. This means that large segments of the global population will depend on authoritarian governance to attract FDI, which is widely considered important to global economic development. Furthermore, understanding whether or not we can expect FDI to have a democratizing impact on autocratic government is crucial to developing expectations about how FDI will shape global politics in the decades to come.Item ALLIES OR ADVERSARIES? THE AUTHORITARIAN STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE: A CASE STUDY OF THE MEKONG DELTA(2017) Wallace, Jennifer; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Natural resources are collective goods that the state has the authority and responsibility to protect from overuse and overexploitation. In order to achieve this protection, the state must rely on the actions of local actors, experts, and business leaders who are most closely connected to the natural resource base. The dependence of the state on local actors to implement resource-protection policies makes the conduct of environmental management within authoritarian regimes a particularly interesting area in which to observe the state’s strategic choices concerning its relations with civil society. The potential threat to state control posed by an emergent civil society means that the state must weigh its interests in maintaining its authoritarianism against the benefits provided by civil society, such as the ability to analyze and implement the state’s policies effectively. This dissertation focuses on how the government of Vietnam manages these apparent tensions between allowing participation on a critical issue area and maintaining its control as an authoritarian state. I argue that the state does not respond uniformly or consistently to all types of civil society actors, even within a single issue area such as natural resources protection. Prevailing explanations of why the authoritarian state has shown permissiveness toward civil society actors fail to account for variation in the state’s response to different actors and across levels of governance. In this paper I present an alternative framework that provides a more nuanced understanding of the state’s interests with respect to various types of civil society actors. I argue that the state’s engagement with various civil society organizations depends primarily on three characteristics: 1) the organization’s mobilizing capacity; 2) issue independence; and 3) the external strategic value of the organization. These three characteristics shape whether the authoritarian state of Vietnam views the organization as a threat to be subverted and repressed in order to maintain its own authority, or a cooperative partner in the management of the state’s natural resources. In addition, this dissertation discusses the implications for successful water management in the region.Item The New Politics of Patronage: The Arms Trade and Clientelism in the Arab World(2012) Marshall, Shana R.; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In states without robust democratic institutions, public resources are often allocated on the basis of patronage. This distribution of patronage, along with the manipulation of official institutions (such as electoral systems and the judiciary) and the deployment of the coercive arms of the state provided the formula for authoritarian longevity in the Arab World. However, much regional scholarship continues to focus on the process through which patronage is distributed with little reference to how the underlying resources accrue to Arab regimes in the first place. Such studies fail to interrogate the organizational and financial interests of the external institutions (such as oil markets and aid organizations) that mediate this transfer of resources, and how those interests shape methods and patterns of resource distribution within Arab States. This paper is an attempt to identify some of these institutions and patterns by focusing on the array of patronage resources made available through the arms purchases executed by regional governments. The specific class of resources examined here is reciprocal investment contracts that U.S. defense firms negotiate with procuring country governments in order to facilitate arms sales, known in industry parlance as `defense offsets.' Procuring states design their own offset policies, including the amount of investment that foreign arms manufacturers are required to make and the domestic enterprises where those funds must be allocated. The procuring state's discretion over the process allows us to draw some conclusions about how these governments distribute offset investment to strengthen incumbents' patronage-based support networks. This analysis also reveals how U.S. defense firms are able to influence the negotiation process in order to secure their own financial benefits. By examining how defense firms and their customers in the Middle East collude to structure weapons contracts in order to generate offset agreements that are mutually beneficial, we gain a better understanding of how patronage politics operates in the contemporary regional context. We are likewise alerted to the subtle ways in which influential external actors can insinuate their own interests into the process, and how the interactions between these groups create ever-evolving new opportunities for patronage politics.Item Confronting Authoritarianism: Order, Dissent, and Everyday Politics in Modern Tunisia(2011) Chomiak, Laryssa; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Schwedler, Jillian; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a study of contestation and resistance under authoritarianism based on field research conducted in Tunisia (2008-2010) and Ukraine (2007 and 2009). The central objective of this study is to shed light on forms of contestation and resistance that exist under closed political systems through a careful analysis of a select sample of individuals engaged in protest politics through extra-institutional channels. My purpose is to explore the understudied case of Tunisia under Zine Abedine Ben Ali before the January 2011 Jasmine Revolution. More specifically, to what extent was the sudden burst of large-scale protest against the authoritarian rule of ex-President Leonid Kuchma culminating in the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine relevant to an understanding of the sudden reversal of the Tunisian dictatorship? I argue that meaningful forms of contestation and resistance do exist under closed political systems, but they need to be located beyond formal political institutions. With elections in the Middle East and North Africa increasingly being co-opted by the state and civil society severely compromised, oppositional forces have had to turn elsewhere to have their voices heard. In this dissertation, I trace alternative political identities, forms of micro-contestation and attempts at direct resistance against the state. In particular, I examine extra-institutional political spaces, including soccer stadiums, subversion in print-publications and performing arts, internet mobilization campaigns via Facebook and Twitter, as well as loosely-organized street-based protests and strikes. The authoritarian state, I argue, does not always revert to repression of oppositional voices but also engages in a subtle dialogue with regime challengers. Such a dialogue can result in the opening of some areas, such as internet censorship and freedom of press, which are important platforms for the advancement of alternative and oppositional politics. On January 14, 2011, the Jasmine Revolution erupted in Tunisia followed by similar waves of resistance across the Middle East and North Africa. Where applicable, I link pre-Jasmine Revolution contestation to the widespread resistance that followed Ben Ali's resignation.Item Contested Populism: The Cross-pressured White Working Class in American Politics(2010) McTague, John Michael; Morris, Irwin L; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While there has been a fair amount of research on class cleavages in the United States, the extant literature is a muddle of competing explanations of the political behavior of the white working class. Some argue that they are trending more Democratic on economic grounds in an era of growing inequality, while others point to growing Republican support based on social, cultural, and moral issues. I argue that the white working class is cross-pressured in a political environment that makes both the economic and cultural dimensions of class salient. Class shapes important economic outcomes, such as income, but it also socializes an authoritarian worldview. Although the Republican Party has made strong inroads with this constituency on the basis of their relatively higher levels of authoritarianism, the Democratic Party remains a competitive alternative based on its economic policies.