Book Manuscript


OPEN ECONOMIES, CLOSED POLITIES: FINANCIAL GLOBALIZATION AND AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS

Building on my doctoral thesis, this book identifies conditions that make financial openness and authoritarian rule mutually compatible. I demonstrate that openness in closed polities is sustainable in political regimes that possess redistributive capacity to maintain political stability. In financially open autocracies, greater exposure to mercurial global financial markets diminishes the ability of the ruling elites to rely on repressive tactics. Consequently, the ability to deploy non-repressive means of maintaining social order allowed an authoritarian regime like the one led by Vladimir Putin in Russia to afford more financial openness than the Chinese Communist Party, which employs a more repression-based model.









Published Work

Review of Capital, Coercion, and Postcommunist States by Gerald M. Easter (June 2014) Europe-Asia Studies 66-4

"The Dirty Truth About Russia's 'Dirty' Money."  The Moscow Times # 5231. 2013-10-10.

"Generational Differences in Russian Attitudes towards Democracy and the Economy." 2008, Europe-Asia Studies 8, 1345-69. [co-authored with Jeffrey Hahn]

Working Papers

"Open Economies, Closed Polities: Financial Openness and Authoritarianism with Evidence from Russia and China." (submitted)

"Low-Capacity Democracy: The Gravitational Pull of Procedural Democracy in Low-Income Countries, with Evidence from Kyrgyzstan and Mali." [with Jaimie Bleck] (revising)

"Russian Business Offshore: Politics of Russian Capital Flight after Capital Account Liberalization." (in preparation)

"Welfare Authoritarianism and Global Economic Integration in Russia and China." (in preparation)

"Alliance Management On the Outer Edges of the Imperium: Some Evidence From the Post-Soviet Eurasia" (2008)
 

Please contact me for the most recent versions of these  papers.