Trade Policy among Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: IPE and Authoritarianism

Abstract

Why do some autocracies pursue protectionism for some products while liberalizing others? I argue that trade policymaking in autocracies is shaped by top leaders’ desire to balance the threat of revolt by the masses, which forces leaders to liberalize consumer product imports, and the threat of coup by powerful elites, which forces leaders to liberalize capital product imports in industries in which elites are invested. Institutional factors, such as authoritarian leaders’ power consolidation against elites and regimes’ repressive capacity, influence the severity of these sources of threat. I use large-N quantitative analyses of an original panel dataset on authoritarian elite investments to establish the generalizability of the theory and select case studies to probe the domestic constraints autocrats face and their impact on authoritarian trade policy in the post-Cold War period. This is the first known study that seeks to explain product-level variations in trade liberalization among non-democratic regimes, where the role of the state is much more prominent than suggested by existing factor of production- or firm-based theoretical approaches.

Author

• Wenyan Deng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology