Why has US income inequality surged to unprecedented heights since the 1970s? The rise in inequality was not simply the natural result of differential rates of return but was powerfully driven by politics and policy. This article explores the underlying mechanisms with a focus on market governance, including corporate governance, financial regulation, labor relations, antitrust, sector-specific regulation, and intellectual property rights. Firms and individuals actively shaped market governance in their own favor and then took advantage of that favorable governance in the marketplace. This “inequality snowball” was particularly pronounced in the United States because firms were more aggressive in their business and political strategies and because the political system delivered more winner-take-all policy outcomes than the more consensual political systems of continental Europe and Japan.

How did the Japanese and German politicians approach their nations’ problematic pasts? Whatroles did the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of Germany play in the memory and reconciliation politics of their countries? Why did their approaches differ? This dissertation provides answers to these questions. In the first chapter, I investigate how the JSP approached the reparations agreements with Southeast Asia in the 1950s. By studying Diet debates and controversies surrounding the negotiations of these treaties, I show that the Japanese Socialists exhibited much less contrition and understanding of Asian grievances than expected. In the second chapter, by contrast, I demonstrate the critical role of the German SPD in bringing about the Luxembourg Treaty – a reparations agreement between West Germany and Israel – and facilitating reconciliation with the Jewish nation. In the final chapter I analyze how the SPD approached the problem of Nazi criminals in the postwar era. Through the analysis of court trials and parliamentary debates, I show that the SPD pushed consistently for greater acceptance of the nation’s past mistakes and the need for their atonement – including judicial prosecution of the guilty. All chapters of this dissertation demonstrate that the German and Japanese Socialists played an important role in the memory making of their nations. Despite similar ideological outlooks and the positions they occupied in their domestic political systems, however, their approaches to WWII legacies differed. I argue that the reason for this lies in the different carryovers that the leftist movements brought with them from the pre-1945 era. Through the study of biographies of individual politicians, I show that the SPD’s prewar history of resistance, imprisonment, and exile significantly impacted its thinking about memory and reconciliation politics in the postwar period. By the same token, the lack thereof in the Japanese Socialist camp had serious implications for its behavior after the war. Overall, this dissertation illustrates that if we want to understand the behavior of political elites particularly in the field of public memory making, we need to know who these elites were, what they did in their past and what beliefs they held.

Military interventions continue to be pervasive in Africa. Thirty out of forty-eight sub-Saharan states have experienced at least one successful coup. Nor have these numbers abated. In the 21st century alone, thirteen coups have been successfully staged in Africa, thus far. At the same time, several African countries - such as Ghana, Uganda, Burkina Faso and Benin - have managed to escape from seemingly insurmountable coup-traps. Yet, we understand little about what drives countries into a coup-trap and even less about how countries can extricate themselves from one. What explains this divergence? To address these contradictory trends, I focus initially on Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, neighboring states, with comparable populations, topographies, and economies that have experienced contrasting trajectories. While Ghana suffered five consecutive coups from the 1966 to 1981, Cote d'Ivoire was an oasis of stability and prosperity. However, by the end of the 20th century, Ghana had emerged as one of the few stable two-party democracies on the continent, as Cote d'Ivoire slid into civil war. Why was Cote d'Ivoire so much more stable and prosperous than Ghana in the `60s and `70s? And what explains their dramatic reversal of fortunes?

I answer these puzzles by examining the political strategies of regimes in both countries, with a particular focus on rural alliances. I find that the leaders who followed a rural political strategy were better able to preserve stability, while those who followed an urban political strategy were more likely to suffer coups. In contrast to the prevalent urban-bias thesis, I contend that traditional elites and producers in rural areas - not the organized urban sectors - are most critical to political stability. To show the wider applicability of my thesis, I extend my argument beyond these two countries. In a systematic review of fifty-eight regimes over eighteen sub-Saharan countries, I demonstrate that the rural/urban dichotomy is pervasive and predictive of the success/failure of regimes. Using formal modeling, I show a strong and robust correlation between supporting rural areas and the likelihood of being ousted in a coup as well as longevity in power

Scholars suggest that we are experiencing an "age of apology," as governments atone for past wrongs and citizens hold their leaders more accountable. Yet why would a government ever apologize and grant redress for harmful policies? Since policy-makers are usually loath to admit mistakes or wrongdoing, the people harmed sometimes must engage in collective action to obtain redress. Government responses to such victim groups range from comprehensive redress to negotiated settlements, in which the state disavows any responsibility for the victimization. Redress may come rapidly to some but take decades for others. What explains such differences in the extent and timing of state responsiveness to victim groups' demands for redress?

Victim redress organizations lack the standard resources needed to influence policy-makers: money, access, and votes. Understanding why victims can be powerful requires determining when they are more or less powerful. This study finds that the mode of conflict expansion--the way in which marginalized victim groups gain support from the public and political elites--explains the level of redress that victims receive. Surprisingly, it is not when groups have access that they are most successful, but rather when they expand the arena of conflict by using their victimhood to shame the government and gain the public's empathy. As "accidental activists," therefore, victims' very weakness is their strength.

This project uses paired in-depth case studies to examine how state responsiveness to victim movements differs cross-nationally and across issue areas. Japan and Korea represent interesting contexts in which to examine victim redress politics because these historically "strong states," with insulated policy-making processes, seem unlikely to admit blame, especially to outsiders like victims. This study compares paired victim movements in three issue areas where similar victimization occurred in both Japan and Korea, related to a) the treatment of persons affected by Hansen's disease (leprosy), b) hepatitis C infections from tainted blood products, and c) the abductions of Japanese and South Korean nationals by North Korea. The cross-national comparison reveals that victim groups in Japan generally receive more comprehensive redress than Korean victim groups. Filter groups, such as non-victim activists and the media, facilitate conflict expansion to a greater extent in Japan than in Korea. Across issue areas, conflict expansion dynamics also account for within-country variations in state responsiveness.

The study of victim redress politics suggests more broadly that politics is becoming more open in Japan and Korea, but in markedly different ways. These cases further indicate that the judicial route is more open to grievance groups in both countries, but that the resources to effectively utilize the judicial channel are more widely available in Japan than in Korea. The varying success of redress movements sheds light on accountability mechanisms and the balance of power in state-society relations in East Asia's main democracies.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are at the heart of today's global economy, but their effects on the politics of advanced industrialized countries have not been studied systematically. This dissertation analyzes the case of Japan, a country most likely to reveal foreign MNCs' influence. Japan developed for most of its history with an extremely low presence of foreign MNCs, but it experienced a dramatic influx from the mid-1990s, particularly in long-protected sectors at the core of its postwar development model of capitalism.

The dissertation explains an observed divergence in the political strategies of foreign MNCs in Japan--disruptive challenges to existing policymaking processes and norms of government-business interactions, versus insider strategies, in which MNCs worked within established organizations and prevailing modes of policymaking.

The core contention is that the corporate "clock speeds" of MNCs strongly shape their policy strategies. Clock speeds, the relative rate of change in aspects such as product introduction, product processes, and corporate organization, differs systematically across sectors. By analyzing policy cases within the banking and securities, insurance, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals sectors, this study shows that MNCs with faster clock speeds tend to pursue disruptive strategies, while MNCs with slower clock speeds tend to pursue insider strategies.

This dissertation also shows how changes in Japan's model of capitalism enabled the influx of foreign MNCs and expanded MNCs' opportunities to exercise voice. Through an analysis at the national, sectoral, and firm levels over time, this study shows how Japan's post-bubble political dynamics created new possibilities for foreign entry and voice. The new opportunities to exercise voice were taken advantage of by fast clock speed MNCs, while slower clock speed firms benefited from existing policy processes. The dissertation finds that MNCs can simultaneously influence policy processes along two different time horizons for cause and effect. While disruptive strategies act as exogenous sources of change, delivering shocks to existing arrangements and processes, insider strategies can lead to incremental, but potentially transformative, change over time.

Well known for its centralized local economic system under the national equity principle, Japan has experimented with transforming this regional redistribution system into a new local economic system of governance for more autonomous local economic growth over the past decade. This new local economic governance has been characterized by the increasing involvement of social actors, such as large private corporations and local communities, in policy processes.

This dissertation reveals that new local economic growth strategies for the new local economic governance have operated under very different models in different regions of Japan, although all new local programs have been introduced under the banner of public-private partnership. New partnership programs in the local economic policy arena in the 2000s have moved toward the market model, in which local authorities pursue growth by attracting international business resources, in the major metropolitan areas around Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, whereas they have moved toward the community model, in which local authorities purge growth by mobilizing local organizational resources, in the rest of Japan. The market model is embedded in market reform for deregulation that makes large private corporations' freer activities easy, whereas the community model is an attempt to strengthen the structure of endogenous networks among local authorities and local economic and social elites.

This dissertation highlights two variables to explain regional variations of local economic growth strategies: dual local economic structures and diverging politico-economic coalitions. First, under the rule of Koizumi Junichiro, a coalition of promoting market reform among neoliberal politicians and large private corporations has won politically over a coalition for maintaining national equity among politicians embedded in traditional conservative center-local linkages, local business groups, and local leadership of underdeveloped areas, in national politics. The regional redistribution mechanism stopped functioning in this political choice. Instead, market reform and local community participation have been introduced as alternatives to regional redistribution mechanisms. Second, the major metropolitan areas and other underdeveloped areas, which came to stand on equal conditions for autonomous local economic growth strategies under decentralization reforms, are characterized by different situations in attracting private investment. The competitive regions of the major metropolitan areas have taken the market model as their main local economic growth strategy because they are competitive to attract private investment. In contrast, the protected regions outside the major metropolitan areas have taken the community model as their key local economic growth strategy because they have less competitive local economic structure of fading industries and scare population for attracting private investment.

Over the past decade, reforms for public-private partnership in the local economic policy arena resulted in the disturbance of the Japanese way of balancing market powers and local interests in the postwar period. In the postwar period, the centralized regional redistribution mechanism, led by national politicians and central bureaucracies, functioned as a tool for social integration with consideration for national equity. However, experiments with the new form of local economic governance were not successful in balancing market reform with local community mobilization. The mobilization of local community resources could not match the political role of the regional redistribution mechanism outside the major metropolitan areas. In addition, market reform, which has been more effective in the advanced major metropolitan areas, has produced increasing regional economic disparity. Japan has faced a complicated stand-off between large private corporations detached from specific localities and local communities locked in place, which were connected by national political coordination mechanisms in the postwar period. Although each of two diverging local economic growth strategies has been effective in different regions, there was no national political mechanism for mediating local variations of these localized programs in the 2000s.

In 1976, virtually unknown Californian wine producers shocked the culinary world by beating top French Bordeaux houses at the blind tasting event known as "The Judgment of Paris." The challenge was repeated in 1986 and 2006, with Californian vintners emerging victorious each time. Yet as producers in other countries increasingly meet or surpass French producers in terms of quality, the price differential between French wines and other wines continues to increase. What enables French producers to maintain market price dominance, absent clear qualitative dominance?

I demonstrate that French wine producers maintain price dominance because the French government made regulations that defined geographic zones, which drove prices up by (1) limiting supply and (2) locating brand value with grape growers. Quality French producers were able to pressure the government for these market protections because of strong political organization among growers and deep levels of compromise across the supply chain, notably between growers and wine merchants.

Why have some producers secured these market protections, but not others? And why have these regulations worked in France, but achieved mixed results in other contexts? Unlike quality French producers, both the Italian wine market and the French table wine market are characterized by weak levels of vertical supply chain cooperation, which undermines the construction of a protected market space. I argue these different patterns of political organization explain national and sub-national patterns of production and subsequent market outcomes. I then extend my case to the broader luxury market.

Latin American countries have recently reconfigured their national financial systems in ways that powerfully shape their growth strategies and economic performance in the twenty-first century. Some Latin American countries have developed large capital markets where companies issue equity or long-term bonds, while others have cultivated large long-term credit markets; and some countries have failed to develop adequate capital or credit markets. This dissertation studies this variation in financial system development with two contrasting cases: Chile, which has produced an impressive capital market, and Brazil, which has built up the capacity to deliver long-term bank credit for firms on a massive scale. Argentina, an additional case examined more briefly, scores low on both capital and credit markets. In contemporary Latin America, it is especially critical to understand the politics that drives the evolution of these financial systems, which provide the investment finance that ultimately shapes opportunities for long-run growth.

In 2008, the global financial crisis dried up credit throughout the world. Yet firms in Chile and Brazil continued to grow in this period because they had financial institutions that allowed domestic companies to raise investment capital at home. In the aftermath of the crisis, Chilean and Brazilian firms successfully obtained funds with unusually long-term maturities, albeit through very different channels.

What explains the varying configurations of national financial systems that underlie these new business strategies and opportunities for growth in contemporary Latin America? This study provides a distinctively political explanation of the puzzling contrasts among Latin American national financial systems. The dissertation uncovers the political origins of national financial systems by looking at how states shape domestic markets.

I argue that state involvement in markets hinges on two key policies: state-owned banking institutions’ provision of long-term credit to a country’s firms and the governance of the private segment of the pension system. While some modes of pension system regulation will lead pension funds to channel significant flows of finance to either the equity or the corporate bond market, or to both, other regulatory patterns generate inducements for pension fund investment in other types of assets (e.g. foreign bonds, government debt, and short-term bank deposits), diverting financial flows away from the domestic capital market.

Since state action is the primary driver of variation in the configuration of national financial systems, I begin with the state and the politics within it. Political técnicos—entrepreneurial officials appointed to the top tiers of the executive branch who combine strong expert knowledge with brokering skills—dominate the highly technical, low-salience policy process that shapes domestic markets. I contend that the technical decisions that emerge from power shifts between competing coalitions of executive-branch elite officials with different policy orientations drive the different modes of state involvement in credit and capital markets.

In Chile, top-level officials with a neoliberal policy orientation initiated and then sustained a drastic retrenchment of government lending for the productive sector and designed and enforced formal regulation inducing private-run pension funds to channel major investments to the domestic equity and corporate bond markets. This neoliberal policy orientation underpinning Chile’s mode of state involvement in markets was not predetermined: during its formative phase in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as in its reproduction stage in the 1990s and 2000s, elite executive-branch officials who challenged this economically orthodox orientation had to be defeated and their influence curtailed.

In Brazil, by the late 2000s, elite officials across several agencies successfully pushed for the adoption of a neo-developmental policy agenda. The power shift within the Brazilian state, with the displacement of a coalition of orthodox technocrats that had been strong until the mid-2000s, produced a significant increase in the scale of long-term credit provided by the state-owned National Development Bank (BNDES) and the redirection of giant state-owned-enterprise pension funds as major institutional investors in the domestic stock market and key players in the nascent Brazilian venture capital and private equity industries.

By examining these two contrasting cases, and setting them in the context of developments in Latin America more broadly, I develop a new characterization of Latin American political economies that diverges from attempts to apply the Varieties of Capitalism framework to the region. In that perspective, the largest and most advanced Latin American countries all fit under a single model of hierarchical market economy (HME). Yet since states have developed remarkably different growth strategies—from Chile’s neoliberal continuity to Brazilian neo-developmentalism, to forms of neo-statism in Argentina—we must be careful to appreciate the diversity of political economy models in twenty-first-century Latin American capitalism.

China watchers find it helpful to speak in terms of eras: the Mao era, the Open and Reform era, and now the Xi era. The two foundational themes in this story arc have been the use of autocratic power structures and the degree of integration into the global economy. Developments in the last decade have increasingly melded the more personalist, ideological, and centralized politics of Mao Zedong with the regulatory architecture his successors put in place for markets and internationalization. In this regard, a key dynamic—and a key tension—of the last four decades remains as fascinating as ever: What happens when institutions adopted from more liberal contexts are grafted onto an authoritarian power structure?

The following essays illustrate how this power dynamic plays out in three regulatory areas central to innovation policy: finance, antitrust, and intellectual property. These areas are not only major foci for Chinese policymakers in their prominently articulated goals of indigenous innovation and global technological leadership for the next stage of Chinese development; they are also key institutional frameworks for organizing and facilitating markets.

The first essay focuses on the arrangement that over 80 Chinese companies— often from the scrupulously regulated and highly sensitive tech sector—use to attract foreign capital. In so doing, it grapples with the empirical puzzle of widespread permittance of the circumvention of China’s FDI regime. Drawing on case studies and descriptive statistics, it probes the advantages of allowing firms to operate within the meso-layer between permissibility and proscription. The essay concludes that the understated application of state power has enabled the temporal flexibility necessary to meet evolving state goals. Post-Covid politics render this modulating power dynamic as salient as ever.

The second essay asserts that the regulatory scrutiny Chinese internet platforms have received illustrates that antitrust can function as both a limitation of firms’ social power and a delegation of economic responsibility. This perspective comes from transporting the Brandeisian emphasis on antitrust as a tool for limiting power in democracies to an autocratic context in which various articulations of the Dictator’s Dilemma for maintaining regime power are the most common theoretical starting point. After linking this exercise in conceptual travel to well-established Chinese governance motifs, a close reading of primary sources around the antitrust crackdown on internet platforms in late 2020 and early 2021 provides evidence that Chinese regulators have indeed used antitrust to remind corporate entities that the state views them as its de-facto agents for implementing the state’s economic vision. The essay therefore contextualizes key developments in China’s political economy while pointing to antitrust as a regulatory tool that addresses a more diverse set of political objectives than traditionally theorized. Finally, the third essay investigates how Chinese firms reconcile contradictory incentives from patent policy in their home market on the one hand and the globalization of technology markets on the other. Standard essential patents for 5G telecommunications are the empirical focus because they are a prime example of the interplay between intellectual property being regulated territorially while the underlying technologies are traded in global markets. Chinese firms are major declarers of SEPs for 5G technologies, but filing practices that previous research identifies as responses to Chinese patent policy can disadvantage firms aiming to have their proprietary technology included in international standards and licensed globally. Patent data for their 5G SEP declarations show a partial but incomplete response to this dilemma: While filing patterns reflect the schedule of international standard setting instead of a year-end surge to meet state targets, evidence remains for a year-end drop in patent quality and limited patent filings abroad. These findings illustrate the tensions that China’s evolving patent policy must navigate in transitioning from an emphasis on quantity to an emphasis on quality. Taken together, these essays invite a more precise contextualization of the major changes underway in China’s political economy: Rather than asserting the demarcation of eras, it is instructive to address iterations of fundamental tensions across them. Even amid Xi Jinping’s current calls to “better balance security and development with a greater emphasis on security,” Chinese leadership is affirming the commitment to “high level openness.” The essays in this dissertation point to a reason why. Be it the way companies are financed, monopolistic actors are addressed, or intellectual property promoted, there is an affirmation of frameworks’ value and just as strong an affirmation to bend them in the most facile way possible to the strategic or political imperatives of a given moment. Defining both that moment and those needs is the essential power dynamic in Chinese innovation policy specifically and Chinese political economy more generally. Geopolitics and national security concerns are indeed pushing toward the selective decoupling of Chinese technologies. Xi Jinping’s reassertion of the state is generating considerable uncertainty for the private sector. Momentous though those changes may be, they must operate through institutional structures already in place. How those institutional structures are repurposed and to what ends will shape this new era of Chinese politics. But it is premature to declare China’s openness a relic of the past. It may be increasingly less fulsome and more calibrated, but it is an inheritance not easily erased and a benefactor not easily discarded. In this regard, the power dynamics of Chinese innovation policy are truly befitting of the dialectical nature that has long defined communist rule.