Most democracies are representative. Elected by the people, representatives constitute a legislature and create laws. This is typically done through voting. This raises an interesting question of institutional design: should our representatives vote transparently or by secret ballot? No contemporary philosopher, to my knowledge, has addressed this question. In this chapter I argue that if we take seriously the value of political equality—a normative ideal that nearly all democratic theorists embrace—then voting among representatives in a legislature ought to occur by secret ballot. Representatives should vote just as citizens do in elections. Democratic equality, I argue, thrives in darkness.

Electricity decision-makers often choose to build wind and solar power for economic reasons. Renewable energy development may lead to economic growth, innovation in new sectors, and better employment options. This chapter examines which industrial policies states might choose to encourage these outcomes and whether Brazil and South Africa were successful in this. When private firms are involved – both countries chose private companies to build most of their electricity, through procurement auctions – it creates significant rents for the sector that must be managed to ensurecollective rather than narrow benefits. This chapter works within theoretical literatures on state–business relations. Brazil uses an initial local requirements stage and later public finance to encourage strong growth in wind power installation and manufacturing. The difficulty in developing a solar power industry accounts for its puzzling delay. In South Africa, similar coalitions as in Chapter 2 fight about whether the public or the private sector should produce renewable energy, pitting the powerful labor movement against the state’s industrial policies, in the absence of effective just transition policies.

Developmental states must be politically strong to design, implement, and recalibrate developmental strategies. They must have the capacity to provide rents to firms that nudge them up the innovation frontier, as well as to demand reciprocity, or returns on those rents. Achieving these goals requires effective instruments of control. Analyzing four developmental programs undertaken by various governments during the 1985 to 2018 period – the Manaus free trade zone, the automotive regime, the ethanol program and the Greater Brazil Plan – this chapter demonstrates the endemic weakness of controls. The Brazilian developmental state was ineffective at controlling rents in ways that channeled business energies in strategically productive long-term directions. The causes of weak control included political factors associated with the coalitional presidential system and the weakness of checks and balances, bureaucratic factors such as the fragmentation of oversight, economic factors such as incumbent firm influence, and judicial factors such as the toothless policing of illicit links between firms, the developmental state apparatus, and the political realm.

How and why is nationalization central to the politics of resource-rich countries? This chapter opens with a review of current theories on natural resource wealth and nationalization in political science, economics, and public policy, and then describes why existing theories are unable to answer the questions this book seeks to answer. With these questions in mind, this chapter presents the book’s central theory of why leaders nationalize and how leader survival shapes and is shaped by the choice of nationalization. After describing empirical implications of the argument, the chapter offers initial evidence to support these claims in the form of exploratory case studies of Iran and Iraq. In Iran, the shocking collapse of the Shah in 1979 defied the West’s notion of the “island of stability” in the tumultuous Middle East. In Iraq, the fall of the Hashemite monarchy in 1958 ushered in a decade of instability until the unexpected Ba’athist consolidation in 1968, when Hassan al-Bakr established a 35-year single-party dictatorship. These are precisely the types of outcomes in which the book’s theory predicts nationalization should affect the rise and fall of dictatorships.

In this chapter, I show that the combination of competition and rent-seeking can explain greater willingness to give up sovereignty in the modern world. The chapter uses two strategies. First, using data concerning sovereignty from the Varieties of Democracy data set, I demonstrate that the interaction between contestation and rent-seeking is associated with lower levels of autonomy in a global sample from 1946 to 2009. The chapter then explores why some of the post-Soviet states have been more prepared to integrate with Russia, giving up sovereignty. Regime types associated with higher levels of contestation over rents, such Personalist authoritarian regimes, are more likely to join Russian organizations or sign agreements of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Regimes that manage elite contestation more effectively, such as Party regimes, do not give up as much sovereignty. Similarly, nonauthoritarian regimes that manage rent-seeking more effectively also give up less sovereignty.

Using two case studies, I explore how variation in the political institutions of Georgia and Ukraine across time influenced their changing relationship with Russia since independence. Why have some leaders of these states — sometimes even the same leader at different times — accepted differing levels of Russian authority and control? Changing levels of contestation and rent-seeking explain this variation. I also show that resistance to hierarchy contributed to violent conflict when the dominant state’s demands were rejected.

This chapter explores the relationship between elites and the masses. Even in authoritarian regimes, elites depend on their ability to mobilize support and resources from society to guarantee their political survival. For this reason, the support of society is a potential constraint on elite choices. I show that individuals who perceive high levels of corruption are more supportive of elites surrendering sovereignty. This finding buttresses the idea that rent-seeking and contestation contribute to higher levels of hierarchy. The chapter uses survey data from Georgia and Ukraine to illustrate the point.

This chapter serves two purposes. The first purpose is to provide a theoretical explanation for why subordinate actors will surrender sovereignty to an external power and when they might choose to resist. The chapter lays out how high levels of rent-seeking and high levels of political contestation can create incentives for actors to give up sovereignty. I also show that actors’ choices are going to depend on their beliefs about the costs of formal, territorial expansion for the dominant state. If actors in subordinate states believe that territorial expansion is cheap, then they may support informal forms of hierarchy knowing that the dominant state can impose a more costly form of formal hierarchy even if they resist. The second purpose of the chapter is to show that dominant states prefer informal forms of hierarchy to formal forms of hierarchy such as colonialism or military occupation. This is done by building a theoretical argument regarding the higher costs associated with formal control. This theoretical argument is supplemented by a brief historical survey demonstrating that European powers almost always preferred informal arrangements to territorial expansion, even during periods when there were few constraints on territorial expansion and colonialism.

In the first chapter I provide a brief introduction to the manuscript and the questions it addresses. The concepts of hierarchy and surrendering sovereignty are defined, and the importance of hierarchy for the functioning of international politics is explained. The comparative historical case selection is justified, explaining that it is important to examine the issue of hierarchy in environments where the constraints on formal expansion vary, such as the nineteenth century and the contemporary era, to account for possible systemic causes.

Friendship across a society includes the mild manners of doux commerce. Aristotle ranks economic exchanges according to increasing levels of friendliness: from cash on the barrel, to giving the partner extra time to repay, to a loan, to a gift with strings attached. Instead of reducing each to self-interest (like modern economists do), he finds commodity exchange has a tincture of the goodness of the next level up (interest-free loans), just as loans retain some of the goodness of outright gifts. Across a chasm of differences, we can still observe similar passions today: affection for customers, pride in one’s economic contribution (“gift”), wanting societal recognition (honor) for it. Adam Smith thought this vanity was the root of morality. Full morality is not required for civic friendship but only middle-class “virtues” (Politics, Books 3-4). Fair markets help maintain liberal civic friendship. When free markets are replaced by rent-seeking (crony capitalism, regulatory capture, lobbying), the game becomes rigged and we leave behind win-win assumptions for zero-sum assumptions, in which anyone else’s gain must be my loss. Our mild manners degenerate into resentment and discord.

In this chaper, I examine the relationship between landholding inequality, interventions in agricultural markets, and the stability of authoritarian regimes. I construct measures of the size of rents that are generated by agricultural market distortions. I show that both forms of agricultural rents are much smaller than those originating from oil revenues. I then go on to estimate a series of models of authoritarian regime durability. I test whether landed elites are threatening to authoritarian regimes, and concentrations of landholdings are associated with a greater risk of regime collapse. I find a weak positive relationship between landholding inequality and the likelihood of collapse. I look at the relationship between agricultural rents and regime durability. I find that rents that accrue to the state have no effect on the probability of regime collapse. Rents accruing to agricultural producers, however, do have a significant interactive effect on regime stability. Where landholding inequality is high, regimes that distribute greater rents to the agricultural sector are significantly less likely to break down.

In this chapter, I lay out a theory of agricultural policymaking and political stability under authoritarian and democratic governments. From this theory, I derive a series of empirical hypotheses on policy outcomes and the consequences of agricultural policy for regime stability, which I will go on to test in the remainder of the book.

The introduction lays out the scope and contribution of the book. I begin by arguing that the problem of agricultural policymaking plays a central role in debates on the relationship between development, democratization, and authoritarian politics. One of the most salient and contentious social cleavages to be managed in developing nations is not between the rich and the poor, or the middle class and the state. It is between cities and the countryside, and it plays itself out in markets for agricultural produce and food. I briefly outline the book’s central argument: that agricultural policies are a trade-off between rural interests, who prefer higher prices, and urban interests, who prefer lower prices. This trade-off is made under different rules depending on regime type, and in particular based on the structural threats posed to each sector under authoritarianism. By manipulating prices for agricultural commodities and food, authoritarian governments can co-opt threatening groups to supporting their regime and mitigate the risk of political instability. I outline the structure of the book's chapters.