CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Resimic, Milos |
|---|---|
| Title | Network Ties and the Politics of Renationalization: Embeddedness, Political-Business Relations and Renationalization in Post-Milosevic Serbia |
| Summary | This dissertation addresses the phenomenon of renationalization, which refers to the process of returning previously privatized firms into state ownership. In looking at this process in post-Milošević Serbia, the guiding question in this dissertation is how political and business actors and their ties influence the dynamic of renationalization and what the mechanisms are in this process. Illiberal trends of renationalization became widespread across post-communist countries in the last decade, but we still know little about the nature of this phenomenon and its political roots. Although the existing state capture approach has some analytic capacity to analyze renationalization, its predominant focus on business actors neglects the role of political actors in this process. Rather than a priori assuming primacy of any actor, I argue for the need to map out the micro-level interactions of political and business actors involved. In doing so, I relied on an original longitudinal dataset of 125 big strategic Serbian firms privatized between 2002-2011 and on semi structured elite interviews with oligarchs, CEOs, bureaucrats, politicians and investigative journalists. I argued that two forms of embeddedness of firms influence their likelihood of renationalization: political and ownership embeddedness. I proxied political embeddedness as the presence of political officeholders on firms’ Board of Directors (BOD). Regarding ownership embeddedness, I considered differences in the business and relational capacity of domestic businesses and distinguished between corporate owners, those having profitable corporations and/or a developed network of corporate relations, and second level domestic owners, who lack these capacities. The quantitative analysis in this dissertation, based on Cox proportional hazard model, showed that politically connected firms have a higher likelihood of renationalization than nonpoliticized firms and that firms owned by corporate domestic owners are less likely to be renationalized than those owned by second level businesses. The qualitative analysis explored the logic of these findings. I found that renationalization in politically connected firms occurs either as an unintended consequence of extraction: when incentives for purchasing a firm relate to extractive opportunities which a firm enables, or as a consequence of predation, when various actors, including political parties, businesses, local administration and regulatory bodies collude to exert pressure on private owners to take over their firms. The lower likelihood of renationalization for corporate domestic owners compared to second level domestic businesses happens because corporate owners have a business and/or relational capacity to provide informal benefits to political actors, in exchange for avoiding renationalization of their firms. The findings in this dissertation advance the literature on state capture, by, first, recognizing that renationalization is not a unidirectional but multirelational phenomenon, and second, by identifying the relevance of political parties and partisan allegiances in the dynamic of renationalization. Conceptually, this dissertation offers novel findings regarding modalities of renationalization by looking at the micro-level dynamic of this process and at the incentives of political and business actors. Empirically, this study is one of the first attempts to understand the political foundations of renationalization from a micro-level perspective and the first study focusing on any Western Balkan country. |
| Supervisor | Vedres, Balazs |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/resimic_milos.pdf |
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