Joel W. Simmons

Party system structure and its consequences for foreign direct investment

Studies of foreign direct investment’s (FDI’s) determinants focus on irreversibility as the main source of governments’ credibility problems. Here, we highlight an underexplored source of time-inconsistency dilemmas: geographic agglomeration within a country. FDI’s tendency to agglomerate creates visible inequalities in the country and generates demands for geographic income redistribution. Unchecked, such redistributive pressures can dissuade investors from entering the country altogether. Not all political systems are equally vulnerable, however. Countries with regionalized party systems are relatively unattractive to investors because regionalism increases the probability that investment returns from one region will be appropriated by the national government and used for geographic-based income redistribution. Countries with national parties, however, are less likely to engage in such behavior. Thus, we predict higher FDI inflows in countries with nationalized party systems and lower inflows in countries characterized by regional parties. Evidence from democracies between 1975 and 2007 supports our argument and its posited causal mechanisms.

Resource Wealth and Women’s Economic and Political Power in the U.S. States

Ross argues that oil wealth reduces women’s economic and political power, but critics maintain that accounting for a community’s attitudes toward gender equality makes the gendered resource curse disappear. This article disentangles the two perspectives by studying the effects of resource wealth on women’s economic and political status in the U.S. states, where resource wealth varies significantly while cultural differences are comparatively small. Data between 1997 and 2012 reveal evidence of a gendered resource curse, consistent with Ross. I also update the theory of the gendered resource curse by showing, via a culture-augmented labor–leisure model of workforce participation, that far from being irrelevant when accounting for varying attitudes toward gender roles, resource wealth and those patriarchal attitudes combine to suppress even more women’s economic and political influence. Data from the U.S. states support this expectation as well.