Marcus J Kurtz
Biographic Data
| ID | 260378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcus J Kurtz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcus J |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurtz |
| SIGNATURE | KURTZ M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2800-8007 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 589 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Oil “Rents” and Political Development
Research on the political implications of oil wealth is now over two decades old, and yet still unresolved. Despite many advances in this literature, a core concept—resource rents—remains under-theorized, and even less well measured. This mis-measurement, we contend, has direct and significant consequences for theoretical findings on the resource curse. Although rents refer to excessive profits, analyses to date have not directly or indirectly fo…
Does Free-Market Reform Induce Protest? Selection, Post-Treatment Bias, and Depoliticization
Across myriad literatures, it is widely held that expanding economic grievances induce violence, protest, or other forms of backlash. In Latin America, where economic liberalization deepened the downturn of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s (and 1990s), reform has been tightly associated with protest and mobilization. At the same time, liberal economic reforms have proven to be remarkably durable, even where long-promised benefits are hard to discer…
The Social Construction of the Regulatory Burden
What drives the private sector's attitude toward the public sector? We address the question by regressing survey data on the perceived burden of government regulation on objective data on the nature, cost, and administration of the regulation of entry in different political and economic contexts. The results suggest that businesspeople perceive democratic, regulatory, and left-of-center governments to be inefficient, net of objective conditions, …
Oil and Democracy
By the end of the twentieth century, a scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that oil fuels authoritarianism and slow growth. The natural abundance once thought to be a blessing was unconditionally, and then later only conditionally, a curse for political and economic development. We re-examine the relationship between oil wealth and political regimes, challenging the conventional wisdom that such natural resource rents lead to authoritaria…
Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective
Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective provides an account of long-run institutional development in Latin America that emphasizes the social and political foundations of state-building processes. The study argues that societal dynamics have path-dependent consequences at two critical points: the initial consolidation of national institutions in the wake of independence, and at the time when the 'social question' of mass politica…
Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective
Capturing Statestrength
an earlier version of this paper was presented at the 'stateness in Latin america' conference in santiago, chile march 2012.We'd like to thank (without implicating) participants at the conference and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and Kevin arceneaux for a helpful email exchange.this article is part of the millenium nucleus for the study of stateness and democracy in Latin america, project ns100014, of the ministry of economy and touris…
Paths to Financial Policy Diffusion
The dominant approaches to the study of capital account liberalization have highlighted institutional barriers to reform and have also demonstrated an important role for interdependence, or the diffusion of a policy innovation from one country to another, as a causal force. Our approach contrasts with the institutional approach and seeks to clarify the political mechanisms of international policy diffusion. Specifically, we develop and test hypot…
Conditioning the “Resource Curse
Since the 1990s it has become conventional wisdom that an abundance of natural resources, most notably oil, is very likely to become a developmental “curse.” Recent scholarship, however, has begun to call into question this apparent consensus, drawing attention to the situations in which quite the opposite result appears to hold, namely, where resources become a developmental “blessing.” Research in this vein focuses predominantly on the domestic…
The Social Foundations of Institutional Order
This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions-the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite confli…
Embedding Neoliberal Reform in Latin America
Although research in the advanced industrial nations has identified a supportive link between an expanded public sector role and economic openness, studies of the developing world have been much less sanguine about the possibilities of broader state intervention in the context of economic liberalization. The authors investigate the possibility that governments in Latin America may “embed” economic openness in a broader public sector effort. They …
Growth and Governance
Growth and Governance
The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance—the quality of public administration—to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? How solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest that the dominant measures of governance are problema…
Capital, Trade, and the Political Economies of Reform
Existing approaches to the study of economic reform have focused on the mobilization of special interests that oppose liberalization and have tended to assume that reform dynamics follow a similar logic across distinct policy arenas. Analysis of the dynamics of capital account and trade liberalization in 19 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates otherwise. Movement toward liberalization is shaped systematically by the timing …
The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection
The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual “property” and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of soft…
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Do activist trade and industrial policies offer developing countries a viable alternative to either neoliberal or mercantilist development regimes? We hope to answer the question by, first, distinguishing the 'open economy industrial policies' in vogue today from either their 'closed economy' predecessors-i.e., import-substituting industrialization-or more orthodox approaches to development policy making; second, tracing the growth of nontraditio…
Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside
This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy. It demonstrates how the implementation of even very painful free-market economic reforms in Chile and Mexico have helped to consolidate democratic politics without engendering a backlash against either reform or democratization. This national-level compatibility between free markets and democracy, however, is founded on their rural incompatibility. In the countryside, free-ma…
The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy
Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways…
Understanding the Third World Welfare State after Neoliberalism
While much attention has been focused on the political foundations of social welfare regimes in the advanced industrial countries, less is known about the politics of social provision in underdeveloped areas, in Latin America in particular. Discussions highlight the fiscal constraints attendant upon free market economic reforms, questions of policy efficiency, and the political uses and abuses of antipoverty spending.1 This emphasis is jarring, h…
The Political Foundations of Post-communist Regimes
This article explores the causes of differing post-communist regime transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, emphasizing the increasingly prominent thesis that economic liberalization promotes political democratization. We explore this argument in light of findings from other regions that have emphasized modernization, agrarian class structure, and international influences. Our results are based on a multilevel design strategy, …
State Developmentalism without a Developmental State
If export orientation is a goal in a sustainable development strategy, this study argues that public interventions at the sectoral level in a variety of markets can produce economic reorientation that pursues international comparative advantage faster and at lower cost than free market forces can. Pervasive failures in information, credit, input, distribution, and insurance markets can render strictly market-based adjustment both slow and costly.…
The Post-Nafta Political Economy
Understanding peasant revolution
The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization
The past thirty years in Latin America have produced tremendous transformations of the state's role in society, both in the scope of its activities and the extent of its presence. Sometimes this has led to the state's unprecedented expansion into the far reaches of economic and social life, other times to its retreat from direct institutional presence in favor of indirect market-mediated linkages to society. The impact of these transformations on…
Social Origins of Central American Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Growth and Governance
The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance—the quality of public administration—to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? How solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest that the dominant measures of governance are problema…
The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy
Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways…
Embedding Neoliberal Reform in Latin America
Although research in the advanced industrial nations has identified a supportive link between an expanded public sector role and economic openness, studies of the developing world have been much less sanguine about the possibilities of broader state intervention in the context of economic liberalization. The authors investigate the possibility that governments in Latin America may “embed” economic openness in a broader public sector effort. They …
Capital, Trade, and the Political Economies of Reform
Existing approaches to the study of economic reform have focused on the mobilization of special interests that oppose liberalization and have tended to assume that reform dynamics follow a similar logic across distinct policy arenas. Analysis of the dynamics of capital account and trade liberalization in 19 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates otherwise. Movement toward liberalization is shaped systematically by the timing …
Conditioning the “Resource Curse
Since the 1990s it has become conventional wisdom that an abundance of natural resources, most notably oil, is very likely to become a developmental “curse.” Recent scholarship, however, has begun to call into question this apparent consensus, drawing attention to the situations in which quite the opposite result appears to hold, namely, where resources become a developmental “blessing.” Research in this vein focuses predominantly on the domestic…
Oil and Democracy
By the end of the twentieth century, a scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that oil fuels authoritarianism and slow growth. The natural abundance once thought to be a blessing was unconditionally, and then later only conditionally, a curse for political and economic development. We re-examine the relationship between oil wealth and political regimes, challenging the conventional wisdom that such natural resource rents lead to authoritaria…
Paths to Financial Policy Diffusion
The dominant approaches to the study of capital account liberalization have highlighted institutional barriers to reform and have also demonstrated an important role for interdependence, or the diffusion of a policy innovation from one country to another, as a causal force. Our approach contrasts with the institutional approach and seeks to clarify the political mechanisms of international policy diffusion. Specifically, we develop and test hypot…
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Do activist trade and industrial policies offer developing countries a viable alternative to either neoliberal or mercantilist development regimes? We hope to answer the question by, first, distinguishing the 'open economy industrial policies' in vogue today from either their 'closed economy' predecessors-i.e., import-substituting industrialization-or more orthodox approaches to development policy making; second, tracing the growth of nontraditio…
Growth and Governance
The Social Foundations of Institutional Order
This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions-the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite confli…
The Political Foundations of Post-communist Regimes
This article explores the causes of differing post-communist regime transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, emphasizing the increasingly prominent thesis that economic liberalization promotes political democratization. We explore this argument in light of findings from other regions that have emphasized modernization, agrarian class structure, and international influences. Our results are based on a multilevel design strategy, …
The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection
The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual “property” and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of soft…
Chile's Neo-Liberal Revolution
This article analyses the surprising emergence of a comprehensive and coherent neo-liberal developmental model during the period of military rule in Chile. Rather than reflecting a clear and definitive choice, the political process that produced this model was characterised by hesitation, policy contradiction, shifting priorities, and incremental choices. This was a result of the military's efforts to deal with two, often conflicting, overarching…
Understanding the Third World Welfare State after Neoliberalism
While much attention has been focused on the political foundations of social welfare regimes in the advanced industrial countries, less is known about the politics of social provision in underdeveloped areas, in Latin America in particular. Discussions highlight the fiscal constraints attendant upon free market economic reforms, questions of policy efficiency, and the political uses and abuses of antipoverty spending.1 This emphasis is jarring, h…
The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization
The past thirty years in Latin America have produced tremendous transformations of the state's role in society, both in the scope of its activities and the extent of its presence. Sometimes this has led to the state's unprecedented expansion into the far reaches of economic and social life, other times to its retreat from direct institutional presence in favor of indirect market-mediated linkages to society. The impact of these transformations on…
Free Markets and Democratic Consolidation in Chile
Military rule in Chile (1973-1989) produced a profound neoliberal reorganization of the national developmental trajectory and was followed by a peaceful return to democracy. However, the surface confluence of economic liberalization and democratization in Chile belies a more complex interrelationship. On the one hand, neoliberalism has been a key factor facilitating democratic transition and consolidation through the rural political base it has p…
Understanding peasant revolution
Capturing Statestrength
an earlier version of this paper was presented at the 'stateness in Latin america' conference in santiago, chile march 2012.We'd like to thank (without implicating) participants at the conference and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and Kevin arceneaux for a helpful email exchange.this article is part of the millenium nucleus for the study of stateness and democracy in Latin america, project ns100014, of the ministry of economy and touris…
Oil “Rents” and Political Development
Research on the political implications of oil wealth is now over two decades old, and yet still unresolved. Despite many advances in this literature, a core concept—resource rents—remains under-theorized, and even less well measured. This mis-measurement, we contend, has direct and significant consequences for theoretical findings on the resource curse. Although rents refer to excessive profits, analyses to date have not directly or indirectly fo…
State Developmentalism without a Developmental State
If export orientation is a goal in a sustainable development strategy, this study argues that public interventions at the sectoral level in a variety of markets can produce economic reorientation that pursues international comparative advantage faster and at lower cost than free market forces can. Pervasive failures in information, credit, input, distribution, and insurance markets can render strictly market-based adjustment both slow and costly.…
Does Free-Market Reform Induce Protest? Selection, Post-Treatment Bias, and Depoliticization
Across myriad literatures, it is widely held that expanding economic grievances induce violence, protest, or other forms of backlash. In Latin America, where economic liberalization deepened the downturn of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s (and 1990s), reform has been tightly associated with protest and mobilization. At the same time, liberal economic reforms have proven to be remarkably durable, even where long-promised benefits are hard to discer…
Social Origins of Central American Democracy
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Chile's Neo-Liberal Revolution
This article analyses the surprising emergence of a comprehensive and coherent neo-liberal developmental model during the period of military rule in Chile. Rather than reflecting a clear and definitive choice, the political process that produced this model was characterised by hesitation, policy contradiction, shifting priorities, and incremental choices. This was a result of the military's efforts to deal with two, often conflicting, overarching…
Free Markets and Democratic Consolidation in Chile
Military rule in Chile (1973-1989) produced a profound neoliberal reorganization of the national developmental trajectory and was followed by a peaceful return to democracy. However, the surface confluence of economic liberalization and democratization in Chile belies a more complex interrelationship. On the one hand, neoliberalism has been a key factor facilitating democratic transition and consolidation through the rural political base it has p…
The Post-Nafta Political Economy
Understanding peasant revolution
The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization
The past thirty years in Latin America have produced tremendous transformations of the state's role in society, both in the scope of its activities and the extent of its presence. Sometimes this has led to the state's unprecedented expansion into the far reaches of economic and social life, other times to its retreat from direct institutional presence in favor of indirect market-mediated linkages to society. The impact of these transformations on…
State Developmentalism without a Developmental State
If export orientation is a goal in a sustainable development strategy, this study argues that public interventions at the sectoral level in a variety of markets can produce economic reorientation that pursues international comparative advantage faster and at lower cost than free market forces can. Pervasive failures in information, credit, input, distribution, and insurance markets can render strictly market-based adjustment both slow and costly.…
Understanding the Third World Welfare State after Neoliberalism
While much attention has been focused on the political foundations of social welfare regimes in the advanced industrial countries, less is known about the politics of social provision in underdeveloped areas, in Latin America in particular. Discussions highlight the fiscal constraints attendant upon free market economic reforms, questions of policy efficiency, and the political uses and abuses of antipoverty spending.1 This emphasis is jarring, h…
The Political Foundations of Post-communist Regimes
This article explores the causes of differing post-communist regime transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, emphasizing the increasingly prominent thesis that economic liberalization promotes political democratization. We explore this argument in light of findings from other regions that have emphasized modernization, agrarian class structure, and international influences. Our results are based on a multilevel design strategy, …
Free Market Democracy and the Chilean and Mexican Countryside
This book examines the relationship between free markets and democracy. It demonstrates how the implementation of even very painful free-market economic reforms in Chile and Mexico have helped to consolidate democratic politics without engendering a backlash against either reform or democratization. This national-level compatibility between free markets and democracy, however, is founded on their rural incompatibility. In the countryside, free-ma…
The Dilemmas of Democracy in the Open Economy
Scholars have usually understood the problem of democratic consolidation in terms of the creation of mechanisms that make possible the avoidance of populist excesses, polarized conflicts, or authoritarian corporatist inclusion that undermined free politics in much of postwar Latin America. This article makes the case that, under contemporary liberal economic conditions, the nature of the challenge for democratization has changed in important ways…
The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Protection
The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sea change in global governance in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Whereas countries historically retained substantial autonomy with regard to what they defined as intellectual “property” and the rights granted to the owners of intellectual property, the 1990s witnessed the establishment of new global obligations regarding national practices. This paper focuses on the case of soft…
Credit Where Credit Is Due
Do activist trade and industrial policies offer developing countries a viable alternative to either neoliberal or mercantilist development regimes? We hope to answer the question by, first, distinguishing the 'open economy industrial policies' in vogue today from either their 'closed economy' predecessors-i.e., import-substituting industrialization-or more orthodox approaches to development policy making; second, tracing the growth of nontraditio…
Growth and Governance
Growth and Governance
The regnant scholarly consensus linking good governance—the quality of public administration—to economic development has undergone surprisingly little empirical scrutiny. We examine the relationship by asking two questions: How confident are we in our cross-national measures of good governance? How solid are the empirical foundations of the growth-governance causal linkage? Our results suggest that the dominant measures of governance are problema…
Capital, Trade, and the Political Economies of Reform
Existing approaches to the study of economic reform have focused on the mobilization of special interests that oppose liberalization and have tended to assume that reform dynamics follow a similar logic across distinct policy arenas. Analysis of the dynamics of capital account and trade liberalization in 19 Latin American countries between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates otherwise. Movement toward liberalization is shaped systematically by the timing …
Embedding Neoliberal Reform in Latin America
Although research in the advanced industrial nations has identified a supportive link between an expanded public sector role and economic openness, studies of the developing world have been much less sanguine about the possibilities of broader state intervention in the context of economic liberalization. The authors investigate the possibility that governments in Latin America may “embed” economic openness in a broader public sector effort. They …
The Social Foundations of Institutional Order
This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions-the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite confli…
Conditioning the “Resource Curse
Since the 1990s it has become conventional wisdom that an abundance of natural resources, most notably oil, is very likely to become a developmental “curse.” Recent scholarship, however, has begun to call into question this apparent consensus, drawing attention to the situations in which quite the opposite result appears to hold, namely, where resources become a developmental “blessing.” Research in this vein focuses predominantly on the domestic…
Capturing Statestrength
an earlier version of this paper was presented at the 'stateness in Latin america' conference in santiago, chile march 2012.We'd like to thank (without implicating) participants at the conference and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and Kevin arceneaux for a helpful email exchange.this article is part of the millenium nucleus for the study of stateness and democracy in Latin america, project ns100014, of the ministry of economy and touris…
Paths to Financial Policy Diffusion
The dominant approaches to the study of capital account liberalization have highlighted institutional barriers to reform and have also demonstrated an important role for interdependence, or the diffusion of a policy innovation from one country to another, as a causal force. Our approach contrasts with the institutional approach and seeks to clarify the political mechanisms of international policy diffusion. Specifically, we develop and test hypot…
Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective
Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective provides an account of long-run institutional development in Latin America that emphasizes the social and political foundations of state-building processes. The study argues that societal dynamics have path-dependent consequences at two critical points: the initial consolidation of national institutions in the wake of independence, and at the time when the 'social question' of mass politica…
Latin American State Building in Comparative Perspective
Oil and Democracy
By the end of the twentieth century, a scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that oil fuels authoritarianism and slow growth. The natural abundance once thought to be a blessing was unconditionally, and then later only conditionally, a curse for political and economic development. We re-examine the relationship between oil wealth and political regimes, challenging the conventional wisdom that such natural resource rents lead to authoritaria…
The Social Construction of the Regulatory Burden
What drives the private sector's attitude toward the public sector? We address the question by regressing survey data on the perceived burden of government regulation on objective data on the nature, cost, and administration of the regulation of entry in different political and economic contexts. The results suggest that businesspeople perceive democratic, regulatory, and left-of-center governments to be inefficient, net of objective conditions, …
Political science (24 works) · Economics (23 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Political economy (16 works) · Development economics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Economic system (10 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (10 works)