Global Economic Governance Programme

A considerable debate precludes drawing conclusions about oil’s effect on democracy. This article challenges this stalemate by significantly expanding the scope of the previous research and using meta-regression analysis to examine the integrated results of extant scholarship. While the results suggest a nontrivial negative association between oil and democracy across the globe, they also indicate a notable variation in this relationship across world regions and institutional contexts. A conditioning effect of institutions may lie more in a broader set of economic and political institutions, less so in previous political regime, but not in institutions associated with British colonial past. Finally, while oil does not seem to impede democracy by retarding two key channels of modernization—income and urbanization—it may have an indirect negative effect on democracy through its adverse impact on education.

This article examines a mock trial I have developed and used in teaching the history of political thought. Mock trials have been underused but have great potential to become an effective and exciting tool for student learning in this area. In this mock trial, the plaintiff, defendant, attorneys, and witnesses are eminent political or economic thinkers or political leaders of the past. Active engagement in this mock trial helped my students immensely in gaining deeper insight into and a more nuanced understanding of the ideas of the thinker they represented, as well as enhancing their critical and analytical abilities and improving their research skills. As a teaching tool that is amenable to creative adaptation, a mock trial can be an engaging and effective exercise for delving into the history of political thought and making it more relevant.

This paper aims to understand why some natural resource rich developing countries have been able to diversify their economies while others have failed in this. Unlike much of the extant research in this area, this study develops and tests several hypotheses on political and institutional, rather than purely economic and geographic, factors enabling or hindering export diversification in the resource-rich developing world between 1962 and 2010. Among other things, it suggests that international institutions designed to help these countries overcome their “resource curse” through diversification can be effective only when they are alert to the different political and
institutional terrains.

This article presents an interactive theatre tool that aims to facilitate a nuanced, holistic exploration of different topics in political science. Its approach builds on insights drawn from the work of four playwrights who provide fascinating, in-depth examinations of social and political topics: Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal. Two features that distinguish the method I present here from other techniques are student ownership and interaction with the audience. At a time when political science is increasingly criticised for becoming overspecialised, irrelevant, and unstimulating, this paper offers a promising and flexible tool that can help synthesise ideas from thriving but often ingrown areas of political science research, contextualise them, and examine their practical relevance.

Autocracies in developing countries are more likely to collapse during economic crises. Some influential works and popular media extend this argument to oil-rich autocracies, but cross-national empirical studies find little evidence to support this view. Yet, while the causes of their stability during boom periods are well understood, how oil-rich autocratic regimes remain stable during busts is underexplored. This article advances an explanation that refines and complements existing accounts. I argue that we need to take into account three interrelated factors that currently are likely to stabilize oil-rich autocracies: considerable savings, policy learning, and sustenance of coercive capacity. Leveraging evidence drawn from 40 original interviews, documents, news media, and academic literature, I investigate the role of these factors through a comparative case study of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan during the 2008 global economic turmoil. The findings highlight the ruling elites' ability to amass sizeable savings that later provide safety cushions, to update their know-how through drawing lessons within and beyond fiscal policy, and to sustain coercive capacity without resorting to overt repression. Through economic crises, they may learn to not escape the "resource curse," but to escape despite the "resource curse."

Worldwide democratic backsliding and surge of authoritarianism have revived interest in the potential of schooling to support democracy. Yet, while many intellectuals, donors, governments, and civil society organizations continue acting on this belief, the empirical literature they rely on is remarkably divided. We challenge this gridlock by offering a theoretical and methodological framework to account for conflicting findings and to facilitate resolving this debate. Our approach combines ideas on how different levels of schooling, ways of accounting for different contexts, and epistemic community influences can affect the relationship between education and political regime. To examine these ideas, we leverage statistical meta-analysis of synthesized empirical evidence base. Contrary to mainstream views, we find that, while the overall education-political regime relationship is positive, it is small and contingent. Pro-democratic effects of education come mostly from primary schooling and are uncertain beyond this level. Country-specific factors may explain part, though not all crossnational variation. Finally, we detect strong evidence of dissemination and publication biases that shape our knowledge on education-democracy linkage.

Despite their short-term benefits for public finances and contributions to improving national credit ratings, natural resource funds (NRFs) often fall short of addressing the economic challenges they were designed to mitigate. The most convincing account to date, offered by Humphreys and Sandbu (2007), suggests that in autocracies, NRFs fail to contain government spending due to their ineffectiveness in altering elite incentives. However, this paper advances a more pragmatic explanation: the underlying reasons why autocratic leaders establish NRFs in the first place. Otherwise, the puzzle of why autocrats establish an institution that potentially limits their power is unexplained. The most apparent reason is lessondrawing, but it is not limited to the "benevolent" or economically efficient motives suggested by epistemic community advice from the IMF and the World Bank. Natural resource-rich autocrats in the 21st century draw from the experiences of their predecessors in previous decades, prioritizing those policies that enhance political survival, not economic efficiency. Moreover, the other two reasons, which are more consequential, are political. First, establishing an NRF can enhance autocratic leader's legitimacy both domestically and internationally. Second, and more subtly, a strategically designed NRF can entrench the leader's de facto control over natural resource revenues. The NRFs in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan exemplify the validity of this explanation.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the deeply contentious politics of expertise. Until recently popular discontent with technocratic elites and attacks by populist politicians significantly undermined the trust in experts as many were seen as elitist establishment figures. The pandemic notably reversed this trend (Wellcome Trust Gallup Inc., 2020). The need for sound scientific advice became painfully obvious. Yet, government reliance on expert advice has varied greatly (Cook et al., 2020). Some governments heavily drew on epidemiologists, virologists, ecologists, and economists, while others ignored or even marginalized them. Furthermore, the pandemic exposed naïve beliefs in the existence of consensus among experts. While some divergences owed to modeling choices, others were due to the politicization of science by various groups employing favored models to advance their agenda. Moreover, the crisis highlighted the long-standing tensions between technocracy and democracy (Sánchez-Cuenca, 2017; Bertsou et al., 2020). Finally, a large variation in the quality of expert advice became apparent largely after the exponential growth in pseudo-experts—COVID-19 influencers and “armchair epidemiologists”—managed to mislead millions of people (Starbird et al., 2020).

Between 1998 and 2003, conflict, violent crime and severe economic downturn pushed the Solomon Islands state to the brink of failure, exacerbating the problems of an already struggling education sector. Most schools on Guadalcanal were seriously disrupted; some were burnt down or vandalized, others closed as teachers and students fled violence, and those that remained open struggled to accommodate the large displaced student population. The collapse of state finances stripped any remaining funding from the education sector; teachers were paid irregularly, if at all, while many schools lacked basic teaching materials and proper sanitation. In 2003, the Regional Assistance Mission in Solomon Islands (RAMSI) intervention quickly restored security and stabilized government finances. RAMSI provided significant budget support to the education sector and opened the door for donor reengagement. Schools re‐opened, new facilities were built and teachers were paid, allowing the government and donors to focus on longer‐term constraints, including abolishing school fees. Government expenditure on education is high, but financed almost entirely by donors. Solomon Islands is now one of the world’s most aid dependent countries and remains vulnerable to external shocks and natural disasters. Weak economic forecasts suggest the need for additional external budget support to protect social spending, including on education.