Limited Government in Nondemocracies (The Role of Capital Owners).

Accountability in Nondemocratic Regimes;Limited Government;Democratization;Policy-making;Capital Owners;Structural Dependence of the State on Capital;Political Science;Social Sciences;Political Science

Altinoglu, EbruHicken, Allen ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Accountability in Nondemocratic Regimes;    Limited Government;    Democratization;    Policy-making;    Capital Owners;    Structural Dependence of the State on Capital;    Political Science;    Social Sciences;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/64586/ealtinog_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Nondemocratic regimes are marked by the absence of a formal (or effectively functioning) mechanism of political accountability. The present study, however, investigates the seeds of some kind of an informal mechanism of accountability which may ;;restrict’ the policymaking power of autocratic rulers. In that regard, it focuses on the business-state relations in nondemocratic countries. Autocratic rulers may make policies favoring the interests of the capital owners. The main argument of the study is that if that policymaking springs from the bargaining-power of the private sector, then it can be regarded as a form of accountability—indirect accountability. It is indirect, because, the capital owners cannot directly remove the rulers off the office. Nevertheless, by ceasing to invest or produce (exit), they can halt or shrink the size of the economic activities from which the rulers extract their revenue (tax revenue). As a result, by exiting or simply by (credibly) threatening to exit, capital owners can indirectly hold the autocratic rulers accountable for the policies they make. The present study, thus, quantitatively tests whether we indeed observe a policymaking favoring capitalist interests in general, or at least the interests of the capital owners in the leading economic sector of a country, when (1) the incumbents are financially dependent on tax revenue, and (2) the private-sector credibly threatens to exit or actually exits. Credible exit-threat is conceptualized as a function of (a) investment strength and independence of the private sector and (2) existence of sectorally determined viable exit-opportunities. The results of a series of time-series-cross-sectional regression analyses indicate that, controlling for other factors, the joint presence of the conditions of indirect accountability is positively correlated with the level of certain pro-leading-sector policies. The importance of the findings hinges on a possible link to unlimited government, and democratization, in the long run, through transfer of economic power to the private sector due to policy concession made, and also through formalization and spread of habits of interaction between the government and citizens.