Paasha Mahdavi’s Power Grab: Political Survival Through Resource Nationalization

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This roundtable will discuss Paasha Mahdavi’s book, Power Grab: Political Survival through Extractive Resource Nationalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020). The book shows how leaders of resource-rich states maintain their grip on power by seizing control of oil, metals, and minerals production. Mahdavi argues that leaders nationalize extractive resource operations to capture revenues that otherwise flow to multinational corporations. This revenue is crucial to leader survival as it provides the means to purchase popular support, co-opt elites, and ward off would-be challengers. Yet nationalization is a gamble: it entails technical risks, it can elicit retaliation from international investors, and it is less operationally efficient in the long run compared to production by private firms.

The book tests the argument using a combination of case studies on Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia; Bayesian statistical analysis of state intervention in the oil sectors of 175 countries over 110 years; and a novel within-country time-series analysis of pre-revolutionary Iran using archival methods. Together, the argument and empirical evidence offer innovative insights on the rise and fall of political leaders in extractive-resource economies.

Do these findings translate to other economic sectors? Is expropriation of foreign investment used as a tool in other settings for leadership survival? In line with this year’s conference theme, this roundtable will also focus on the role of nationalization in providing autocrats the means to thwart demands for democracy and in fueling the antidemocratic tendencies of democratically-elected leaders.

Sub Unit

• Division 39: Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics

Chair

• Michael L. Ross University of California, Los Angeles

Presenters

• Paasha Mahdavi University of California, Santa Barbara

• Erika S. Weinthal Duke University

• Benjamin Smith University of Florida

• Victor Menaldo

• Alexander Slaski Leiden University