Elite Opportunity in Transitional Economies
By Andrew G. Walder. American Sociological Review, 2003
231 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Command economies gave Communist-era elites administrative control and material Privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth. Markets and Privatization have injected new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders. These opportunities depend on the extent of regime change and barriers to asset appropriation. Regime change varies from the survival of the entire party hierarchy to its rapid collapse and defeat in competitive elections. Barriers to asset appropriation vary with the extent, pace, and form of privatization, and the concentration and liquidity of assets. Different combinations of such circumstances jointly affect the extent to which prior elites obtain ownership or control of Privatized assets, use political office to extract larger incomes, move into salaried elite occupations, or fall out of the elite altogether. Regime change and barriers to asset appropriation affect change at the national level, but outcomes vary across economic sectors because of characteristics of organizations, elite positions, and assets. This elementary theory serves to integrate varied findings from recent research on Central Europe, China, and Russia, and yields predictions for other regions.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eddcc7521079e50acd20e4fc6d09927e3609b60b
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Citations in the corpus
- Contingent Political Capital and International Alliances: Evidence from South Korea (2007, background): “Walder (2003) pointed out that as long as the state controls access to finance and technology and enforcement of banking regulations, tax laws, and other 626/ASQ, December 2007 laws, political connections will continue to be valuable.”
- Human Capital and CEO Compensation during Institutional Transitions (2015, unknown): “The main difference in terms of personal wealth is that cadres and officials during the pre-transition era had limited wealth, and they, once installed as CEOs at better funded, listed firms, can now fetch much larger compensation and perks (Walder, 2003, p. 903).”
- Housing inequality and housing poverty in urban China in the late 1990s (2006, background): “…present stage can be summarized as the coexistence of increasing return for educational attainment, which indicates penetration of market mechanisms, and the persistence of a premium for political credentials, which represents systemic inertia of the planned-economy (e.g., Walder 2003; Nee 1996).”
- Organizational Forms and Multi-population Dynamics (2014, background): “Another stream of sociology research emphasized the continued influence of local political institutions on defining the transition path (Lin, 1995; Walder, 1996, 2003; Peng, 2001).”
- Political Capital in a Market Economy (2010, unknown): “(Walder 2003:901) This line of reasoning reinforces the view that politically connected managers are advantaged in operating companies (Róna-Tas 1994).”
- Determinants of entrepreneurial activities in China (2010, result): “Our empirical findings are, however, just the opposite, and they are consistent with the argument put forward by Walder (2003) that, with economic reform and partial privatization, there are more values being injected into publicly-owned assets hence creating unprecedented opportunities for elite…”
- The Continuing Importance of Political Ties in China (2014, background): “Our arguments can be applied reasonably well only in contexts where the pace of regime change is low and where barriers to asset appropriation are high (Walder, 2003).”