An Unfortunate Alignment of Heterodoxy,Nationalism, and Authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia

I address the urgent need to deal with the deliberate misuse of heterodox criticism of neoliberal policies in modern Russia. State-funded propaganda has been using distorted institutionalism to rationalize both authoritarianism and nationalism as a left-wing response to global neoliberalism and as a welcome manifestation of civilizational plurality. To help western heterodox-institutionalists offer an informed critique of what Vladimir Putin’s apologists have made of some heterodox ideas, I discuss the particularities of the history of Russian post-Soviet economic thought, and explain who these apologists are and what their training is. I also clarify how, in post-socialist Russia, it has become possible to successfully misappropriate the institutionalist emphases on the significance of culture and history in socio-economic development, and on the active role of the state in a market economy for narrow ideological purposes. In my conclusion, I emphasize strongly that traditional institutionalism is not compatible with oppression and authoritarianism.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

Karl Marx’s Theory of Socio-Institutional Transformation in Late-Stage Capitalism

This article is in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen’s organized-intelligence-in-action definition of technology¹. It intends to identify the social technology necessary for organizing knowledge in order to get a grip on social change. Social change is seldom directed by discretionary policy; its rate is too fast for most to comprehend, and it has consequences that too often are neither desirable nor just. Since the last century scholars have “accepted the idea that the circumstances of existence were continually changing, that society was necessarily in the process of making adaptions to the changing circumstances, and that intelligent adaptation would result in human progress.“² Yet most of our social science models have yet to incorporate these dynamics. To further our understanding, scientific modeling must be developed to reflect social change as the norm, not as the exception to equilibrium.     

Liberalizing Autocracies in the Gulf Region? Reform Strategies in the Face of a Cultural-Economic Syndrome

From an international comparative perspective, the stability of autocratic regimes in the countries of the Gulf region is striking. This paper presents historical–cultural as well as economic explanations and proposes that the interaction of both factors constitutes a cultural-economic syndrome accounting for the persistence of authoritarianism. Macro-quantitative analyses demonstrate the significant influence of this syndrome, which operates through a mechanism of mutual reinforcement and substitution. Departing from this diagnosis, potential remedies are discussed: political and economic reform measures pursued in the 1990s are explored, and the Gulf monarchies are classified according to four ideal-typical combinations of reform strategies.     

Decentralization and coordination: China's credible commitment to preserve the market under authoritarianism

This paper addresses the political economy of development in the context of economic catching-up. Specifically, we conducted a literature review and proposed a framework to examine how China has been able to achieve double-digit annual growth in the last two decades despite the general absence of democracy, rule of law, and private property rights. We find that similar to other East Asian catching-up economies, China is at the stage of a market-preserving authoritarianism. International and domestic competitive pressures and experiences led Deng and other senior leaders to preserve the market for catching-up. Economic decentralization and autonomy on the one hand, and political control and coordination on the other hand, made the policies to preserve the market under authoritarianism largely credible.     

Pro‐social leadership under authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is regarded as being unaccountable for people's needs, but few studies have documented how authoritarian countries balance their policy goals. China is known to use a promotion system to incentivize local leaders to develop the economy, while neglecting social spending. This paper documents that more leaders having a liberal arts background have been promoted as top provincial leaders. After carefully ruling out other channels, we provide evidence that the shift of top provincial leaders’ college educational backgrounds from science/technology to liberal arts/social science has increased fiscal expenditure shares on science, education, culture and public health and cut economic construction expenditures accordingly. The finding is mainly driven by the post‐1994 period, when local leaders had stronger incentives for economic growth. This indicates that Chinese top authorities are promoting more pro‐social local leaders when providing pro‐growth incentives in general.     

家长式领导对员工建言行为的三阶交互效应

作为家长式领导的三个维度，仁慈领导、德行领导和威权领导的三阶交互效应很少得到实证检验。基于218份员工调查问卷，探讨家长式领导的三个维度对员工建言行为的共同影响，研究结果显示：（1）仁慈领导和德行领导与员工的促进性建言、抑制性建言显著正相关；威权领导与员工的促进性建言、抑制性建言显著负相关；（2）德行领导会增强仁慈领导对促进性建言和抑制性建言的正向影响；（3）仁慈领导、德行领导与威权领导存在显著的三阶交互效应，当上级展现出“高德行+低威权”或“高德行+高威权”时，仁慈领导对员工建言行为的正向影响最强；当上级展现出“低德行+高威权”时，仁慈领导会对员工建言行为产生负向影响。     

Bureaucratic discrimination in electoral authoritarian regimes: Experimental evidence from Russia

Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party “Yabloko” to the government party “United Russia” on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.     

The Role of Culture,Historicity, and Human Agency in the Evolution of the State: A Case Against Cultural Fatalism

I examine how the nature of the state and its relationship to its people are determined and evolve. I bring together differing contributions of traditional institutionalism to further an emerging evolutionary-institutionalist discourse concerning the role played by culture and historicity, on one hand, and by individual actions and awareness, on the other, in shaping and reshaping the nature of the state. Such discourse is significant in understanding that, although inherited culture plays an important role in influencing the character of the state in a given society, the future of the state is not fully determined by its history. In equal measure, it depends on the volition of individuals who purposefully amend the state’s institutions through rearranging power distribution. Using Russia’s authoritarian state as a case in point, I demonstrate how this emerging evolutionary-institutionalist discourse can circumvent ideological misuse of the institutionalist paradigm in non-democratic societies.     

战后韩国对外经济战略的演进及其评价

理论界对于韩国对外经济战略的研究,往往认为其早期实施保护性更强的进口替代战略,而后期则选择自由度更强的出口导向战略,对于其对外经济战略的评价,也往往以1997年亚洲金融风暴为界,出现两种截然不同的评价。文章通过回溯战后韩国在不同时期的对外经济战略的选择,提出韩国的对外经济战略并非分阶段选择两种,甚至多种截然不同的对外经济战略,而实质上表现出一个持续的通过强政府推动,开发与利用全球资源的统一的战略思想的结论。