This dissertation studies the causes and consequences of inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). The first chapter identifies and explains a skill bias in the sectoral composition of inward FDI in developing countries; that is, high-skill intensive FDI constitutes a large share of total FDI inflows in autocracies, while low-skill intensive FDI takes a relatively high proportion in democracies. In this chapter, I develop a political economy framework to explain the empirical pattern and argue that the skill bias is an outcome of the interaction between a country's underlying distribution of skills and the logic of political survival. Distinct institutional constraints drive political leaders in autocracies and democracies to adopt different policies toward these two types of FDI to extend benefits to their core constituencies, thus generating a skill bias in the sectoral composition of inward FDI across political regimes. Empirical evidence based on available sectoral FDI data in developing countries supports my argument. To further illustrate the causal mechanisms, Chapter 2 briefly examines FDI policy in China and Taiwan. In Chapter 3, I employ a survey experiment implemented in China to examine the distributional effects of high-skill and low-skill intensive FDI derived in Chapter 1. The results suggest that respondents' skill level is positively and strongly associated with support for high-skill intensive FDI but has no significant effect on their support for low-skill intensive FDI. These findings provide support for the micro-foundations of the political economy framework developed in Chapter 1. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the relationship between economic integration and corruption in China. Using an original dataset of corruption cases to measure corruption at the provincial level, I find that economic integration leads to a high level of corruption in China. This finding runs counter to the conventional wisdom that economic integration helps reduce corruption and thus has important implications for both domestic and global governance. Taken together, this dissertation aims to provide more nuanced accounts of the causes and consequences of FDI inflows.

The dissertation analyzes two interrelated issues, popular sovereignty and secularism, through the lens of the Turkish experience with democracy. Its objective is, first, to deconstruct Turkish secularism, laiklik, linked to the political theology of the homogeneous, sovereign nation and the attendant citizenship regime that only includes Muslim Turks. The dissertation, secondly, aims to reconstitute secularism and popular sovereignty differently in order to make room for pluralism, law, and ethics in the processes of collective will and identity formation, that is, to open up democracy to its others. The prevalent assumption in the literature that Turkish secularism is hostile to religion, aiming to eliminate Islam from the public sphere in a coercive manner is challenged through an analysis of religion textbooks used in public and military education from 1923 to 2010. This analysis suggests that secularism in Turkey does not simply entail the control of religion, but also the instrumentalization of Islam in securing political legitimacy, social integration, and sacrifice for the nation through the Islamic notion of martyrdom. The dissertation also questions the new, allegedly passive version of secularism defended by pro-Islamic conservatives that combines the ontological sovereignty of God with the political sovereignty of the people understood in majoritarian terms. Both of these models, despite their different underlying premises, are authoritarian, thereby, cannot guarantee the freedom of conscience. As opposed to both of these models, the dissertation defends a strict wall of separation between religion and politics at the church-state level, rejecting symbolic, material or political recognition of religion by the state; and a more permeable wall of separation at the level of political interactions among citizens when they are engaged in public debate about coercive laws and policies. With respect to the related question of popular sovereignty, the dissertation takes issue with the political theological concept of the people as a unitary, homogenous subject endowed with a pre-political will (the early republican conception) as well as its seemingly more mundane version articulated in terms of the majority principle (the pro-Islamic conservative conception). The concept of "the people," in its both nationalist and majoritarian versions, the dissertation suggests, is inherently linked to the Schmittian conception of the political as friend-enemy distinction which sacrifices constitutionalism and modern individual rights. Following the insights of Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida on the nature of democratic constitutional state, the dissertation defends a conception of "friendly living together among strangers" by means of positive law, based on a weak, internally differentiated conception of popular sovereignty. The dissertation, in other words, affirms the internal, albeit paradoxical, relationship between popular sovereignty and human rights.

This dissertation analyzes the paradox of national identity in contemporary Taiwan. Under the context of democratic transition and new dynamics of exchanges with Mainland China, Taiwan people's national identification has demonstrated a significant change in the past two decades. Many empirical studies confirmed the emergence of a new Taiwanese identity, the sharp decline of traditional Chinese identity, and presented a clear trend of national identity change in Taiwan. However, there are several puzzling phenomena, such as the growth of dual identification (both "Chinese and Taiwanese"), the divergent rationale for the national identity and statehood preferences (Reunification vs. Independence), and the fluctuation of various national identity change patterns in the society left unanswered in the previous studies. Following the transition process-oriented approach, this dissertation focuses on the underlying organization principles (ethnic-cultural vs. civic-territorial mechanisms) that people take to define and redefine themselves in national terms, and assumes national identification changes and various change patterns in Taiwan were derived from different advantages between the two underlying identity formation mechanisms in response to the external transformations - democratization, new stages of cross-strait exchanges, and the rise of China in the world - that the society have experienced in the past two decades. In light of this new analytical approach, this dissertation explores and explains the changes of national identification in the past two decades - the paradox and puzzling aspects of two "conflicting" national identities, the existence of "dual identities" and both "Unification and Independence" acceptable in a large segment of the population, the divergent rationales behind the national identity and statehood preferences, the decline of Chinese identity in two-stages with the new dynamics of cross-strait exchanges and the rise of China in the international society, and, finally, how Taiwanese identity becomes civic and national out of the democratic transition practices in the past two decades.

This dissertation examines how countries fund welfare states in a context of increasing globalization, structural unemployment and changing demographic and economic structures. The dissertation focuses on two taxes that have seen significant growth over the period of welfare state expansion, and now finance large fractions of the social welfare system in continental Europe and elsewhere: income taxes and social security contributions. As both of these taxes are levied largely on wage income, I show evidence that these two taxes are substitutes. I explain variation in these two taxes using a formal model of insider-outsider politics based on a model of tax and transfer by Moene and Wallerstein (2001). In my argument, labor market insiders, facing little risk of unemployment, prefer social security contributions, and while outsiders with irregular employment patterns prefer income taxes. Insiders prefer social security contributions because they allow them to ring-fence benefits for themselves. Outsiders prefer income taxes because the progressivity and broad base of income taxes allows outsiders' high levels of unemployment to be cross-subsidized by the wealthy and the regularly employed. More broadly, I argue that the tax mix countries choose is part of a broader equilibrium including labor market structures as well as employment outcomes. Echoing the arguments made by Calmfors and Driffill (1988) concerning non-encompassing unions, I argue that rigid labor markets and high social security contribution levels lead to a dualized labor market with high levels of outsider unemployment, which in turn leads powerful insiders to prefer social security contributions that help dualize the labor market in the first place. The argument proceeds as follows: negative employment shocks, combined with nonencompassing unions, leads to these unions to demand job security, which results in unemployment being visited largely on outsiders, who then become part of a `structural unemployment problem'. This chronic underemployment leads to a renewed focus on job security on the part of insiders. This in turn leads to insiders being reluctant to cross-subsidize welfare for the chronically unemployed, and to demands for increased 'contributoryness' of the tax system. The resulting increasing reliance on social security contributions (instead of broad-based income taxes or indirect taxes) raises the marginal cost of labor and contributes to the unemployment problem. This combination of a tax code that reinforces unemployment, and a high level of unemployment that leads to demands for a contribution-financed insurance system, results in a policy equilibrium that can be very hard to reform. By contrast, where unions are encompassing, consequent labor market flexiblity and active labor market policies means that insider-outsider employment cleavages do not result. This means that the pressure on social insurance systems to become more `contribution-financed' remains low, and thus the tax burden on labor remains consistent with high employment. I evaluate the theory in two ways: first, I test the theory qualitatively, by examining the preferences of unions and politicians in Ireland and France since the 1970s. I examine the preferences of French unions in response to reforms to pensions and other benefits in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the Jospin reforms in the 1990s, focusing particularly on a cleavage between the largest French union confederations. In Ireland, I examine the votes of the constituent unions in the ICTU in response to the five national pay/policy agreements in the from 1987 to 2003, as well as the 13 agreements between 1948 and 1979. I also examine the Irish budgets introduced in those years. Secondly, I evaluate the theory at a cross national-level. The specific hypothesis I test is that trade-union density as well as employment outcomes should impact on tax mixes across country years. I employ panel data from the OECD and IMF for this. Measures of trade union density are taken from the OECD. I run a seemingly unrelated regression analysis correcting for the compositional structure of tax mix data. There are five dependent variables per country-year; the share of revenue raised from Income Taxes, Social Security Contributions, Taxes on Goods and Services, Property Taxes, and Other Taxes. I demonstrate evidence that trade union density is positively associated with increases in social security contributions, and decreases in income taxes in the tax mix.

What determines whether organizations with maximalist demands - those calling for regime change and increased political self-determination - employ violent or nonviolent tactics to make their governments acquiesce in political demands? More specifically, why do some organizations employ strikes and demonstrations whereas others employ guerrilla warfare/conventional warfare, and others still terrorist tactics, against their governments? I infer from bargaining theory that rational organizations should prefer to use nonviolent means of contestation to resolve conflicts of interests with target regimes because it is generally less costly than employing violent tactics. When nonviolent protest cannot be employed due to fear of lethal government repression, inability to mobilize enough participants to pose a military challenge, or inability to solve the information problem using nonviolent tactics, organizations are either deterred from using any tactic at all or they employ violent tactics. Whether they do the former or the latter, and which type of violent tactic they employ depends on organizations' ability to mobilize supporters to participate in contention, which in turn depends on popular satisfaction with the status quo. I argue that organizations' choice of tactics depends on two key factors: 1) Anticipated repression of nonviolent protest; and 2) Popular satisfaction with the status quo. I refer to this theory as mobilization theory. I evaluate the empirical support for this theory as well as the predominant theory in the existing literature, opportunity structure theory, by using statistics to analyze organizational choice of tactics in nine high state capacity countries in the Middle East and North Africa from 1980-2004 and 37 low state capacity countries in Africa from 1990-2010.

This dissertation focuses on the role of faith-based reasoning in political discussion, and more specifically on the compatibility of public religious arguments with liberal and democratic premises regarding the justification of political decisions, i.e. decisions made in the name of the state. Public justification is a requirement of legitimacy in liberal democracy: but under which conditions is a decision publicly justified? Are all arguments valid? Religious arguments are often considered with suspicion: they are particular, therefore convincing for only some citizens and rejected by others. It seems unfair, for those who do not share religious beliefs, to use these arguments to justify political decisions. The same objection, however, is also true for many other non-religious arguments, like utilitarian arguments or liberal arguments themselves. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine different strategies aiming to justify the exclusion of certain arguments, and then to offer a new model of political discussion. The claim defended is that absolutist arguments, meaning arguments that are based on the recognition of the existence of an extra-social source of normative validity, do not respect the requirements of public justification and consequently should be excluded from political discussion. The distinction between absolutist and non-absolutist arguments does not overlap with the distinction between religious and secular arguments: it thus cannot be argued that all religious arguments should always be excluded, or that they could always be included.

Exponential growth in data storage and computing capacity, alongside the development of new statistical methods, have facilitated powerful and flexible new research capabilities across a variety of disciplines. In each of these three essays, I use some new large-scale data source or advanced statistical method to address a well-known problem in the American Political Science literature. In the first essay, I build a generational model of presidential voting, in which long-term partisan presidential voting preferences are formed, in large part, through a weighted "running tally" of retrospective presidential evaluations, where weights are determined by the age in which the evaluation was made. By gathering hundreds of thousands of survey responses in combination with a new Bayesian model, I show that the political events of a voter's teenage and early adult years, centered around the age of 18, are enormously influential, particularly among white voters. In the second and third essays, I leverage a national voter registration database, which contains records for over 190 million registered voters, alongside methods like multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) and coarsened exact matching (CEM) to address critical issues in public opinion research and in our understanding of the consequences of higher or lower turnout. In the process, I make numerous methodological and substantive contributions, including: building on the capabilities of MRP generally, describing methods for dealing with data of this size in the context of social science research, and characterizing mathematical limits of how turnout can impact election outcomes.

National oil companies (NOCs) have evolved beyond vestiges of an era of resource nationalism and assumed an international presence. Given that NOCs are generally inefficient entities, why do some governments, more than others, allow their national oil companies to make expensive and often risky investments abroad? Instead of directly refuting neorealism or liberalism, I seek to shift the debate towards problems of governance in the energy sector. While agreeing that geopolitical rationales matter, I posit that they serve as political cover for NOCs pursuing their own expansion. While sharing the liberal emphasis on institutional checks, I anticipate how they may be overcome by strategic NOCs determined to secure support for their investments. I argue that the willingness of governments to restrain NOC investments depends on the presence of veto players, whereas their ability to do so depends on the organization of the energy sector. When the energy sector is governed by multiple entities with overlapping jurisdictions, NOCs can exploit coordination problems among them to escape scrutiny for their investments. This weakness is particularly acute in countries without an overarching energy ministry, where energy policy is implemented by informal bargaining among a multiplicity of ministries and agencies. I test this argument quantitatively and explore the underlying mechanisms through case studies of China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Norway.

This dissertation concerns itself with the negative effects of two structural economic changes in advanced industrial democracies, technological change and financialization on trade unions and how in turn labor market changes in interaction with existing political institutions affect the development of minimum wage policy and individuals' political affinities. I address these issues in four main chapters. In Chapter 2, I develop a new theory of how technological change causes trade union decline. Following work in labor economics, which shows that automation eliminates middle-wage routine task jobs and causes employment growth in non-routine task high- and low-wage jobs, I find that decline in routine task employment is a robust predictor of decline in trade union density for 21 OECD countries. Using linked employer-employee data from Germany, I find that higher levels of heterogeneity in between-worker skill profiles at the firm-level and in between-firm worker skill profiles at the industry level are associated with increased probability of withdrawal and a lower percentage respectively of participation in collective agreements. In Chapter 3, I argue that there should be a negative relationship between stock market development and various measures of trade union strength. Investors have a preference for lower labor costs and higher short-term profits and increased control over management compensation enables them to realize these preferences. Using time series cross-sectional data for 21 OECD countries 1969-2008, I find that short-run increases in stock market development consistently associated with a decline in wage bargaining coordination and centralization, although less consistently associated with changes in union density and opening clauses. In Chapter 4, I explain a counterintuitive fact about wage setting regulation: countries with the highest labor standards and strongest labor movements are among the least likely to set a legal minimum wage. This, I argue is due largely to trade union opposition. I argue that trade unions will oppose the legal minimum wage when they are strong, specifically when they have high levels of what I call effective coverage, a combination of workforce coverage and permissiveness of labor law for cross-union sympathy action. After demonstrating preference variation in line with the theory, I demonstrate the importance of effective coverage by showing how union minimum wage preferences responded to three labor market institutional 'shocks': the Conservatives' labor law reforms in the UK, the European Court of Justice's Laval ruling in Sweden, and the Hartz labor market reforms in Germany. In Chapter 5, I examine how labor market rigidity affects the political affinities of those marginally employed, termed 'outsiders' in recent comparative political economy literature. I argue that outsider attitudes should vary as a function of two types of institutions, employment protection and spending on labor market policy, which worsen and improve outsiders' labor market opportunities respectively. Using data on trade union attitudes and party preferences for 27 OECD countries, I find that relative to non-outsiders, outsiders are less likely to have favorable attitudes toward trade unions and more likely to favor far-right parties in countries with higher labor market institutional rigidity, those in which the difference between employment protection and labor market policy spending is greater. I conclude in Chapter 6 by briefly presenting a normative conception of economic regulation, which I term 'Social Protection as Social Balance.' While recent work on the growth of economic inequality has focused largely on the growth in wealth of the top 1% in various countries, I argue that we should be more concerned with declining labor market opportunities for lower-skills, lower-education individuals. Social Protection as Social Balance' argues for a dual approach to protecting the least well-off: continued vocational and education training to help improve the skills of those who would lose their jobs to structural changes and stronger trade unions to both help ensure that the negative distributional consequences of these changes do not fall entirely on the least well-off and to boost the wages of the jobs which remain.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 260-284). / What explains variation in relatively rising state strategy towards declining great powers? This project develops and tests a theory of state strategy vis-a-vis declining great powers, termed Realist Decline Theory. Realist Decline Theory argues that states debating the strategies to adopt towards a declining peer are forced to consider the costs and benefits of either preying on the declining state, or supporting the decliner and helping it maintain its place within the great power ranks. As the costs and benefits wax and wane, states adopt different degrees of predation or support for self-interested reasons. Two variables - the polarity of the international system and the declining state's military posture - determine these costs and benefits by shaping the security threats facing relatively rising states. This study uses multiple primary and secondary sources to measure Realist Decline Theory's variables and evaluate its analytic power against competing explanations. The argument is tested using two structured, focused comparisons of rising state strategy in the post- 1945 international system: American policy towards the declining Soviet Union (1989-1990), and American and Soviet strategy towards the declining United Kingdom (1945-1949). These cases were selected because they provide strong tests of the theory vis-a'-vis competing theories. The cases also permit observation and evaluation of substantial variation in the nature of rising state strategy. The overall finding is that Realist Decline Theory indeed explains variation in rising state strategy, although other factors are important. This study makes several contributions. First, it identifies and explains an empirical puzzle that is either overlooked or only loosely explained by existing research. Second, the study attempts to synthesize different streams of international relations theory in the realist tradition into a unified realist theory of state strategy. Third, the research contributes to Cold War historiography. Finally, the study offers insight for policymakers worried about the possible decline of the United States and rise of new great powers to international prominence. / by Joshua Richard Itzkowitz Shifrinson. / Ph.D.