Oil and (Non)Democratic Politics: Explaining Resource Nationalism in Russia and Venezuela

This dissertation examines the relationship between political regimes and resource nationalism by asking three main questions: First, it analyzes the relationship between political regimes and degrees of resource nationalism using a three-step classification of regime type. The argument is that the relationship between political regime type and resource nationalism is non-linear once the category of hybrid regimes is introduced. By conducting a cross-country regression analysis, I find that hybrid regimes exercise higher levels of resource nationalism than both authoritarian and democratic regimes. ^ Secondly, this study explains what makes hybrid regimes more prone to resource nationalism. I argue that when the elites are under high electoral pressure, they are more likely to exercise resource nationalism. However, elites also have institutional constraints in the form of checks on the executive branch. As such, hybrid regimes are more likely to adopt resource-nationalist policies, because their institutional structure combines strong motives with low executive constraint. Elites in hybrid regimes have to take electoral pressures into consideration and they lack strong institutional mechanisms that limit the available decision set of energy policy. ^ Finally, this study looks at different resource nationalism strategies under hybrid regimes, using Russia and Venezuela as case studies. When there is high elite fragmentation within the hybrid regime, like Venezuela, the incumbent will have the incentive to secure the office in next term by guaranteeing popular support rather than relying on elite pacts. In order to achieve this winning coalition base, the most likely option is clientelism and increased public spending, and the incumbent prefers statist resource nationalism. When the elite fragmentation is low, as in Russia, the leader can form elite pacts and distribute oil revenues to elites as direct claimants to sustain the next term in office. As such, the leader will prefer private domestic ownership of oil as opposed to state ownership, opting for regulatory resource nationalism.

The International Determinants of Military Coup Behavior

Why do coups d’état happen? Although many studies have investigated this question, they pay relatively little attention to the international causes and ramifications of coups. Especially, empirical studies on the external determinants of coup risk and outcomes still remain limited. There are two current lines of research in this direction. The first line studies international linkages and coup risk, looking at the external determinants of coups: regional spillover effects, foreign linkage, and foreign leverage. A promising angle on this front is focusing on the role of post-coup reactions from international actors to illuminate how coup plotters shape their incentives under outside pressure. The second line of research investigates interstate conflict and coup risk, considering diversionary behavior and external threats as potential coup-proofing strategies. In this effort, studying the relationship between external threat environment and coup risk can be fruitful, whereas empirical tests of the classical diversionary war theory will yield relatively marginal contributions.Currently, three issues stand out in the empirical coup literature that should be further addressed by scholars. First is the need for more extensive and systematic data collection efforts to obtain detailed information about the identities, targets, and motives of coup perpetrators. Second, the external sources of leader insecurity beyond interstate conflicts remain an underexplored area. Third, although many studies have tried to determine when coup attempts happen, scholarly knowledge of when and how they succeed remains very limited. More work is needed to uncover the determinants of coup success across different regimes and leader survival scenarios

External threats and political survival: Can dispute involvement deter coup attempts?

Diversionary war theory holds that insecure leaders are more likely to pursue aggressive foreign policies than their more secure counterparts. This hypothesis rests on the premise that interstate dispute involvement helps leaders deter potential challenges against their rule. We offer strong support for this premise by looking at coup attempts. Cross-national time-series evidence from interstate dispute participation over the period 1960–2000 indicates that a country in a militarized confrontation with another state is about 60% less likely to experience a coup attempt in the subsequent year. Consistent with our hypothesis, we establish that it is mainly militarized involvement in disputes, rather than non-militarized involvement, that is associated with lower coup likelihood. The results are robust to controlling for a wide set of potential correlates of coups and remain qualitatively intact when we focus entirely on within-country variations in coup attempts and interstate disputes