Jane Esberg and Rebecca Perlman - Stealing In Stealth: Regime Type And Strategies Of Expropriation
Jane Esberg, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
,Rebecca Perlman, PhD Candidate, Stanford University
A substantial literature concludes that democracies are less likely to engage in sovereign theft than autocracies. However, little attention has been paid to the strategies of theft regimes employ. We theorize that when democracies steal, they ought to utilize different methods than their autocratic counterparts. Using a dataset containing all expropriations of foreign direct investment that occurred in developing countries between 1960 and 2007, we show that rather than rely on outright nationalization, democracies are more likely to use methods such as forced sale or contract renegotiation, tools which are harder to detect and easier to justify to both the electorate and to potential investors. In fact, while democracies may be less likely than autocracies to nationalize foreign investment, they are as likely as autocracies to engage in more subtle forms of theft. Our findings suggest that by bundling types of expropriation, scholars may be overlooking important differences in regime strategies. Moreover, as overt forms of sovereign theft become increasingly less common, there may be reason to suspect that the democratic advantage in protecting foreign investments could be coming to an end.
Jane Esberg is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Stanford University, specializing in comparative politics and international relations. Her research centers on authoritarian repression, with a focus on historical dictatorships in Latin America and Spain. In her dissertation, she uses new micro-data on political killings, detention, exile, and pop culture censorship to understand variation in the targets and tools of repression during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1989). Results demonstrate that repression served not just to eliminate opposition, but to appeal to supporters.
Jane is a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow and Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. She was previously a fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society. Her research has been supported by a Graduate Research Opportunities Award, the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford's Center on International Security and Cooperation, the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation, and the Europe Center.
Rebecca Perlman is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. She studies international political economy, with a focus on regulation, trade, and the role of international institutions. Rebecca's dissertation explores the origins of health and safety regulations. She develops a theory specifying the conditions under which firms are able to use health and safety regulations in order to block domestic and international competition. The theory produces the surprising conclusion that innovative firms benefit from and actively seek regulations that rule some of their own products unsafe. Beginning in July 2019, Rebecca will be an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.