Political Investments: Political Effects of International Capital Flows

My dissertation consists of three essays focused around the relationship between politics and international investment. I examine the impact of investment in three distinct issue areas: government partisanship, authoritarian regime stability and participation in international agreements. I develop a formal model to explicate the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and the likelihood of coups in authoritarian regimes. The model predicts and I find support for dampening effect of FDI on the probability of coups. Second, I argue that increasing portfolio investment contributes to electoral success of right-wing parties. I find evidence for this hypothesis using a new dataset on political contributions to 59 parties in 12 OECD states. Lastly, I examine the role of network effects in formation of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs). I show that network mechanisms of Triadic Closure explain BIT formation among developing states by using an agent-oriented network model to account for interdependencies within the global BIT network.