Privatization-Nationalization
States and Markets. The Politics of Privatization and Nationalization Waves
Abstract: Exploring the state's presence in the economy through the processes of privation and nationalization has resulted in two opposing views of these phenomena: an almost exclusively economic examination of privatization as a process meant to remove the state out of the market where politics plays no role, compared to a politics-centered exploration of nationalizations analyzed as a reassertion of state power where only politics matters. This project argues that the two processes need to be studied together since historically privatizations and nationalizations occur in cycles. By refocusing the study of these processes on the politics that motivate the choice to privatize or nationalize, this project finds that the interaction between the preferences of domestic coalitions of actors and international economic conditions explains privatization-nationalization cycles. The paper illuminates the undertheorized link between these two processes, but it also introduces a dataset that brings together for the first time data on both privatizations and nationalizations that have occurred since World War II.
(Presented at ISA 2016, APSA 2017)
Additional materials
(Presented at ISA 2016, APSA 2017)
Additional materials
A theory of institutional change. Examining privatization and nationalization in Hungary
Abstract: When Eastern Europe broke away with its Socialist past it rejected not only a political system but the entire way the region's economies were structured. At the time privatization was hailed not only as the process to save local failing economies but also as a direct way toward market capitalism and democracy in a great transformation deemed inevitable and irreversible. However, recent political developments show the fragility of the region's changes and the increasing popular feeling that liberalism has failed to deliver on its promises. This project examines the economic policy changes that Eastern European countries have enacted in recent years, diverging away from market capitalism. The paper examines the failings of the political economy literature on transition in theorizing policy change, and argues that the explanation for the recent reversals of the privatization process rests at the intersection of the domestic political discourse in these countries from populist parties riding a wave of anti-EU sentiment, and the international economic pressures resulting from the 2008 crisis. Using originally collected quantitative data on the economies and political changes of Eastern Europe as well as qualitative data from fieldwork in Hungary, this project finds that governments that are ideologically more inclined to reverse privatization will do so even at the risk of strong international backlash.
(Presented at ASEEES 2016)
(Presented at ASEEES 2016)