CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Smith Bravo, Antonio Henrique |
|---|---|
| Title | Constraining the Executive in Petrostates |
| Summary | What factors explain the political resource curse in countries highly endowed with oil, the most actively traded commodity? Previous studies have focused on certain political dimensions of the resource curse, such as the link between oil-rich and authoritarianism, corruption, and their propensity to violent conflict. However, the effects of oil on political constraints on the executive is an under-researched area. Since political constraints on rulers are a major factor in better institutional outcomes such as enhanced control of corruption, government accountability, meritocratic bureaucracy, and property rights enforcement, this dissertation seeks to study the effects of oil and gas on executive constraints. This thesis is constituted of three papers. The first paper studies the effects of oil wealth in a panel of 156 countries between 1965 and 2014; the second paper addresses the limitation of traditional indicators of executive constraints and constructs a formative index of executive constraints employing principal component analysis; and the third paper explains the effects of the newly defined variable of access to oil and gas resources by the executive on executive constraints employing a counterfactual spatial comparison in two case studies during the oil boom of 2003-2013: Bolivia under Evo Morales and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez. My findings suggest that although the first paper shows that oil wealth explains the deterioration of executive constraints in authoritarian regimes, the third paper found that the negative effects of oil on executive constraints can be offset by lowering their access to hydrocarbons. As it was demonstrated, executive access to such hydrocarbon resources seems to explain whether oil-rich countries are prone to the resource curse or not. However, I found a paradox that greater state capacity in terms of oil exploitation could foster worse institutional outcomes. In addition, I also found that regional political elites can provide place effective constraints on rulers. My second paper operationalized executive constraints by constructing a formative index that could be employed in future studies. Therefore, the findings of the three papers contributed to studying one potential factor contributing to the resource curse in petroleum rich-states: the deterioration of their executive constraints. |
| Supervisor | Dorsch, Michael |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/smith_antonio.pdf |
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