1
Leveraging Weakness into Strength: How Neo-Patrimonial Oil-Producing Countries
Survive Economic Crises
Daniel S. Leon, Charles Larratt-Smith
Published in the Journal of International Relations and Development
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00271-1
Abstract:
Most scholarship on major oil-producing countries (OPCs) focuses on their illiberal characteristics,
but scant research explores how these regimes react to periodic oil price collapses, particularly neopatrimonial OPCs with relatively low state capacity, herein termed gatekeeper OPCs. These OPCs
should be extremely vulnerable to regime change during economic crises. However, since the most
recent collapse in international oil markets in 2014, almost all neo-patrimonial OPCs have managed
to weather the ensuing fallout, thereby begging the question of how these seemingly vulnerable
regimes manage to survive extended periods of economic crises. We hypothesise that the likelihood
of regime survival in neo-patrimonial OPCs depends on a strategic calibration of domestic neopatrimonial policies, such as clientelism and executive aggrandisement, and the skilled navigation
of global geopolitics. We find evidence that incumbent governments leverage international
geopolitical tensions during economic crises to secure valuable foreign aid from key allies, which
allows them to maintain the domestic neo-patrimonial strategies required to safeguard their power.
We reached the above finding through a nested mixed-methods research design combining
quantitative analysis of 35 major OPCs from 2011 to 2018 using Cox proportional hazards models
with the qualitative comparison of two gatekeeper OPCs – Chad and Venezuela.
Keywords: international political economy, authoritarian resilience, oil, economic crisis,
neopatrimonialism, international autonomy
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1) Introduction
For political regimes whose legitimacy is based on patronage, economic crises represent existential
threats, as these shocks create significant pressures and incentives for powerful organisations from
within or outside the ruling coalition to force regime change (O’Donnell and Schmitter 2013; Tilly
2003). The political regimes of major oil-producing countries (OPCs), or those countries whose
yearly average oil rents’ share of gross domestic product (GDP) during the boom-bust period of
2011 to 2018 was at or above the global mean of about 3.5 per cent, have been particularly
susceptible to economic crises, herein defined as a ten per cent downturn in GDP per capita over
two or more consecutive years (https://data.worldbank.org/, (11 May, 2020); Diamond 2010; Karl
1997). Moreover, most OPCs are authoritarian to varying degrees. The Varieties of Democracy
project classified 26 of the world’s 35 major OPCs as some form of autocracy between 2011 and
2018 (see Tables 1 through 4). Hence, incumbents in most OPCs are more likely to set up barriers
to prevent potential political regime transitions and thereby lack the institutional mechanisms to
peacefully resolve the pressures and challenges created by sharp economic downturns (Gandhi
and Przeworski 2006; Ross 2001; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003).
Authoritarian OPCs tend to use neo-patrimonial mechanisms to quell dissent, namely the
clientelist co-optation of powerful organisations and pliant citizens alike through oil-financed
rentierism, a system of patronage that allocates revenues towards regime loyalists (Guliyev 2013;
Goldman 2008; Goldthau and Westphal 2019). Neopatrimonialism refers to the domestic strategies
that allow incumbent governments to ‘buy-in’ political support and legitimacy through clientelist
political relationships while also aggrandising executive powers to remain in power (Islam 2013;
Bratton and van de Walle 1997). This concept is rather protean and stems from the development
of Weberian patrimonial subject-leader relations seen in authoritarian regimes after
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the globalisation of electoral democracy in the late 20th century (Erdmann and Engel 2007;
Fukuyama 2014). As recent events in Sudan and Kazakhstan demonstrate, neo-patrimonial OPCs
appear quite vulnerable to declines in international oil markets, given that ‘buy-in can run into
crisis when the money runs low’ (De Waal 2009: 112). However, most of these regimes have
steadfastly clung to power since the 2014 oil price bust, thereby raising the important question:
How do regimes in neo-patrimonial OPCs survive economic crises?
This paper contributes to the rich contemporary debate on the international political
economy of authoritarian resilience by examining how the most unlikely political regimes survive
periods of extreme economic pressure (Escribà-Folch and Wright 2015; Heydemann et al. 2020;
Smith 2006). Additionally, our work further develops the established research agenda on OPCs by
providing an original typology to analyse the different regime types found amongst the many cases
characterised by oil-based rentierism by deploying state capacity as a key variable for classification
purposes.
The following section discusses the differences among OPCs and a particular category of
them, neo-patrimonial OPCs, which exhibit a relatively low state capacity and are therefore
particularly vulnerable to economic crises. The third section specifies our two-level model
explaining regime survival in neo-patrimonial OPCs during economic crises. These countries
weather turbulent periods by leveraging larger geopolitical rivalries at the international level to
extract crucial military and economic support from key allies to offset their weakened state capacity
while simultaneously streamlining clientelist rent deployment at the domestic level during these
crises. The fourth section details our nested mixed-method research design.
The fifth section provides the results of our quantitative analysis conducted through Cox
proportional hazards models, allowing us to identify the political-economic strategies deployed by
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35 OPCs during the boom-bust period between 2011 and 2018 through interaction terms, which
help increase the probability of their regime survival. The quantitative analysis finds that the
likelihood of regime survival in neo-patrimonial OPCs depends on a strategic balancing act of
international and domestic policies, yet we find that the former determines regime survival during
economic crises.
The sixth section engages in a qualitative comparative analysis of Chad and Venezuela, two
gatekeeper OPCs, or neo-patrimonial countries with extremely low state capacity, which appear to
be most vulnerable to severe economic crises. This section examines how incumbents in gatekeeper
OPCs leverage international geopolitical tensions to secure valuable foreign aid from key allies,
permitting them to maintain clientelist mechanisms required to safeguard their power at home.
Additionally, this analysis shows how two gatekeeper OPCs with drastically different sociohistorical conditions are far from passive agents in global geopolitics. Rather, these ‘weak’ or
‘fragile’ states take advantage of regional and international rivalries and conflicts to attract crucial
foreign financial, military, and technological assistance to bolster their domestic capacities and
weather severe economic crises. We finalise with a brief discussion of our findings and their
implications for the literature.
2) Towards a New Typology of OPCs? The Role of State Capacity
Economic crises in authoritarian OPCs empower potential opponents ‘both within the ruling elite
and among outsiders in society,’ as the weakened inner cohesion of these regimes provide windows
of opportunity to force executive turnovers, whether through institutional or extra-institutional
means (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007: 1288; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Diamond 2010). Yet,
not all OPCs are equally vulnerable to massive economic downturns, as their susceptibility depends
on their state capacity. We define state capacity as a continuum between the presence and absence
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of a Weberian bureaucracy, meaning the presence of hierarchical state organisations with
bureaucrats that exercise their duties based on codified and impartial rules (Cornell et al. 2020).
This definition of state capacity is independent of regime type, as it does not assume outcomes of
public administration, such as governmental effectiveness.
[Table 1 around here]
We propose a typology categorizing OPCs into four groups: liberal democratic/hybrid,
absolutist, neo-patrimonial, and gatekeeper OPCs. Tables 1 through 4 show the levels of state
capacity, periods of economic crisis, regime type, and levels of neopatrimonialism in the 35
analysed OPCs, divided into each of the four categories.1 Liberal democratic and hybrid OPCs,
depicted in Table 1, such as Norway, Ghana, and Colombia, show relatively high state capacity,
little reliance on neo-patrimonial mechanisms compared to other OPCs, and an absence of
economic crises from 2011 to 2018.
[Table 2 around here]
Predictably, authoritarian OPCs, depicted in Tables 2 through 4, were likelier to experience
severe economic downturns perpetuated by oil price busts, which should have made challenges to
their incumbent rulers likelier. However, not all authoritarian OPCs are the same. Closed and
electoral autocratic OPCs with high state capacity, or absolutist OPCs, are relatively stable and rely
on neo-patrimonial mechanisms to a certain extent, as evidenced by countries such as Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, and the UAE (Diamond 2010; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007). In absolutist OPCs, oil-based
patronage provides an extra layer of stability for the political regime, as the elite organisations
supporting the regime, such as the military or religious institutions, created durable political
regimes before the exploitation of oil. Thus, severe economic downturns do not necessarily
endanger the survival of these regimes (Smith 2006).
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[Table 3 around here]
In contrast, authoritarian OPCs with relatively low state capacity that rely more heavily on
the deployment of clientelist strategies, or neo-patrimonial OPCs, are more susceptible to
challenges by political competitors after massive economic downturns. Neo-patrimonial OPCs,
such as Algeria, Cameroon, or Russia, maintain the quiescence of powerful organisations and
common citizens alike by simultaneously co-opting these actors through oil-financed ‘buy-ins’ to
avoid fractures leading to a possible military coup or other forms of political competition, while
also deterring popular dissent through the threat or actual deployment of violence (Gandhi and
Przeworski 2006; Ross 2001; Goldman 2008).
[Table 4 around here]
However, a subset of neo-patrimonial OPCs is even more vulnerable during economic
crises. One can characterise these countries that suffer from precarious state capacity as gatekeeper
OPCs, where ‘[r]egime survival is a constant challenge for and preoccupation by governments’
(Henningsen and Gissel 2020: 5). Gatekeeper OPCs, such as Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and
Venezuela, achieve regime survival by foregoing any semblance of Weberian state capacity.
Instead, these countries concentrate on controlling the nodal points or ‘gates’ connecting their
societies to the international economy to guarantee their political survival (Cooper 2019). There
exists a conceptual overlap between gatekeeper states and fragile states, as both are characterized
by their precarious levels of state capacity and vulnerability to violent conflict (Babajide et al.
2021). However, the former concept differs from the latter insofar as it refers exclusively to those
political regimes in resource-rich countries that can maintain power while possessing extremely
low state capacity. Unsurprisingly, all gatekeeper OPCs, except Turkmenistan, reported severe
economic downturns after the 2014 collapse in international oil prices. However, what is surprising
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is that all of these regimes have weathered the ensuing crisis period and have clung to power until
the present by deepening crucial alliances abroad to offset heavily streamlined rent deployment at
home.
3) A Two-Level Model of Regime Survival in Neo-Patrimonial OPCs
Our model follows the path of other works that seek to explain how incumbent governments juggle
priorities and coordinate policy in multi-level strategic games encompassing domestic and
international politics (Putnam 1988). However, this ‘two-level game’ differs as it analyses neopatrimonial regimes within the wider pool of OPCs. Neo-patrimonial OPCs are vulnerable to
international oil market fluctuations and do not normally achieve policy consensus through
institutional negotiations but co-optation and repression. Given the incentives and structural
dynamics found in the broader array of authoritarian OPCs, the option of a negotiated transition,
especially those produced by pressures from civil society and mass mobilisations, is rare outside
of liberal democratic and hybrid OPCs and thus is not included in this analysis (Escribà-Folch and
Wright 2015; Gandhi and Przeworski 2007).
The first level of our model represents the domestic neo-patrimonial strategies adopted by
OPCs to appease key actors through clientelist mechanisms, especially the military, while purging
other stakeholders whose support is deemed expendable when state resources become increasingly
scarce. One can see the political use of neo-patrimonial mechanisms, namely economic patronage
by a regime’s agents, in countries that only superficially adopted democratic norms and institutions
(Islam 2013; Bratton and van de Walle 1997). Moreover, given that clientelist patronage requires
discretional spending by the executive, the executive needs to have more power relative to other
branches of government to increase the political effectiveness of such mechanisms (Erdmann and
Engel 2007; López Maya 2018).
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Incumbent regimes in neo-patrimonial OPCs increase neo-patrimonial mechanisms to
reconfigure their ruling coalitions by making state expenditure more exclusionary (Byman and
Lind 2010). Such political restructuring promotes ‘personal loyalists to top party and government
posts while purging rivals, thereby converting institutional constraints into institutional weapons,’
effectively prioritizing those stakeholders whose support is deemed crucial for their ongoing
survival (Slater 2003: 88). By streamlining clientelist redistribution, beleaguered neo-patrimonial
OPCs secure the loyalty of the security forces, which can defend the regime from internal and
external threats. While this strategy enables ‘coup-proofing’ during periods of economic and social
stability, it becomes crucial during periods of economic crisis (De Bruin 2018; Albrecht 2015).
The second level of our model represents the international system and the pressures and
constraints placed on neo-patrimonial OPCs by their positions in the global order. The international
political economy of oil draws all OPCs into the complex vagaries of international geopolitics
between competing hegemons (Gould and Winters 2012; Casey 2020; Heydemann et al. 2020).
Regimes in OPCs invariably are forced to navigate the treacherous waters of great power politics
and simultaneously satisfy the demands of domestic groups, a balancing act of international and
domestic priorities, which for neo-patrimonial OPCs turns into a high-stakes strategy of regime
survival when oil prices inevitably collapse (Colom-Jaén and Campos-Serrano 2013; Mijares
2017).
For neo-patrimonial OPCs, geopolitical positioning plays a key ontological role in shaping
domestic policies such as the domestic distribution of oil rents through clientelist mechanisms.
Neo-patrimonial OPCs, like other states in the international system, either support the status quo
hegemonic power alliance or pursue a revisionist anti-hegemonic foreign policy (Organski 1958).
Whereas status-quo states are content to maintain the established order of things, revisionists seek
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to change the global distribution of power and goods in their favour (Davidson 2016; Chan et al.
2019). Nevertheless, analyses of status-quo and revisionist states in the International Relations
literature have largely focused on great powers, thus diverting attention away from how states with
relatively low state capacity (e.g. neo-patrimonial OPCs) can leverage their position in the
international sphere. These regimes demonstrate an ability and willingness to enhance their
international autonomy or the extent to which they can pursue foreign policy alignments without
direct external imposition, shaping their domestic capacities (Tang 2018; Stipić 2016).
For neo-patrimonial OPCs, especially the subset of gatekeeper OPCs, their international
autonomy serves as a vital lifeline to attract crucial resources and technologies to bolster their
internal stability, particularly during economic crises. This strategy provides military and economic
support from stronger allies, valuable intelligence transfers, and repressive know-how to survive
existential challenges from hostile domestic, transnational, and foreign organisations (Diamond
2010; Pemunta and Tabenyang 2016). Our analysis demonstrates how many of the existing
explanations found in recent scholarship on International Relations often overstate the effects of
hegemonic alliances and ignore the agency of less powerful countries in shaping outcomes on the
international stage (Kim and Woods 2016; Chan et al. 2019). Moreover, OPCs have
disproportionate regional and global significance due to their vital oil resources, which lowcapacity OPCs can leverage to their advantage.
This paper’s main hypothesis derived from the above two-level model is that:
H1: We expect a particular interaction between domestic policies (e.g., a greater
degree of neopatrimonialism) and international policies (e.g., a more autonomous
foreign policy) will lead to regime survival.
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If the quantitative analysis supports an interaction effect between the domestic and international
policies employed by OPCs to weather the boom-bust period of 2011-2018, then we will analyse
the following subsidiary hypotheses during this same timeframe:
H2: Periods of economic crisis condition the interaction between domestic
policies, thus increasing the likelihood of regime survival in OPCs when the
degree of neopatrimonialism increases during economic crises.
H3: Periods of economic crisis condition the interaction between the international
policies, thus increasing the likelihood of regime survival in OPCs when
international autonomy increases during economic crises.
The second and third hypotheses aim to isolate whether the domestic and international strategies
are crucial during periods of economic crises.
4) Research Design
Our paper utilises Lieberman’s (2005) nested mixed-method research design to test the above
hypotheses and ultimately answer how authoritarian OPCs survive periods of economic crisis.
Using a quantitative analysis of 35 major OPCs between 2011 and 2018, we test our hypotheses
and identify a relationship between the two-level model developed in the previous section and the
likelihood of regime survival during this boom-bust period. This timeframe allows us to focus on
the immediate effects of the 2014 international oil price and include South Sudan in the analysis.
The quantitative analysis ends in 2018, as this was the last year of available data for the outcome
variable. Subsequently, we deploy a qualitative comparative analysis of two gatekeeper OPCs –
Chad and Venezuela – to complement our quantitative analysis by tracing the processes laid out
in the confirmed hypotheses, thus allowing us to test further the paper’s model (Lieberman 2005).
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The qualitative analysis focuses on the period after the collapse of international oil prices in 2014
until the present.
4.1. The Quantitative Analysis
We first test our hypotheses through Cox proportional hazards models (henceforth, Cox models).
Cox models are widely used to analyse authoritarian survival, as they do not assume the shape of
the baseline hazard to estimate an event’s probability of occurring (Casey 2020; Wallace 2013).
Our analysed event is regime change, which we codified as one when a significant political change
occurred within an incumbent regime. We sourced the occurrence of regime change from the
regime durability indicator of the Polity5 database, which codes regime change as a change in the
Polity score of three or more points occurring within a three-year period, which follows from
drastic
changes
within
a
political
regime
or
its
replacement
with
another
(https://www.systemicpeace.org/inscrdata.html, (28 June, 2021)).
Our basic Cox model is:
Regime Change(t) = Regime Change0(t) × exp[b1-3X + b4-8Z]
Three covariates in our basic Cox model (X) are of main interest for our hypotheses, which are:
•
Neopatrimonialism: this indicator helps us operationalise the domestic strategy, sourced
from the Varieties of Democracy’ (V-Dem) neo-patrimonial rule index (Coppedge et al.
2021). This indicator measures the degree of ‘clientelistic political relationships, strong and
unconstrained presidents, and the use of public resources for political legitimation’
(Coppedge et al. 2021: 290; Bratton and Walle 1997). The operationalisation of the index
is a coefficient interval ranging from zero (least neo-patrimonial) to one (most neopatrimonial).
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•
International Autonomy: this covariate sourced from the V-Dem project helps us
operationalise the international strategy (Coppedge et al. 2021). It measures the extent of a
country’s foreign policy autonomy on a continuous interval ranging from minus two (no
foreign policy autonomy) to two (full foreign policy autonomy). This covariate helps us
operationalise the ability of OPCs to navigate international geopolitics, independent of
pressures and coercions by great powers (Tang 2018; Stipić 2016).
•
Economic Crisis: this dummy variable denotes each year that a country experienced a ten
per cent decline in its GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity, international US dollars)
after
two
or
more
consecutive
years
(https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/WEO, (10 May, 2021)).
Our basic Cox model also includes five politico-economic control variables (Z), which are:
•
State Capacity: we estimate Weberian state capacity through the V-Dem project’s ‘rigorous
and impartial public administration’ indicator (Coppedge et al. 2021), which measures the
degree to which public officials exercise their duties impartially and based on codified
norms (Cornell et al. 2020). We converted the original scale into a five-point categorical
variable as detailed in endnote one.
•
Regime Type: the ‘Regimes of the World measure,’ from the V-Dem project (Coppedge et
al. 2021), controls for OPCs’ political regimes based on the ability of domestic agents to
access power, polyarchy. This ordinal variable ranges from zero (closed autocracy) to four
(liberal democracy).
•
Oil Prices: the average yearly oil prices control for changing conditions in the international
oil market. We sourced the yearly average Europe Brent crude oil price spot, OPEC’s main
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price
index
(https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RBRTE&f=A,
(20
March, 2021)).
•
Oil Rents: yearly average oil rent income as a share of GDP per country controls how a
changing
international
crude
market
affects
the
revenues
of
OPCs
(https://data.worldbank.org/, (11 May, 2020)).
•
State Violence: this interval variable from zero (high state violence) to one (low state
violence) sourced from V-Dem’s ‘Physical Violence Index’ measures a government’s use
of violence, which controls for different degrees of violent conflict in an OPC, ranging from
the repression of dissent to counterinsurgency (Coppedge et al. 2021).
[Figure 1 around here]
Regarding model diagnostics of the basic Cox model, we tested for the assumption of
proportional hazards through Schoenfeld tests, which were statistically insignificant (p-value >
0.05) for all continuous covariates, except for oil prices. Statistically insignificant results confirm
this assumption. To test for influential observations, Figure 1 illustrates the deviance residuals of
the covariates of interest, which are distributed around zero, helping to rule out that an
overproportion of outliers reduces the models’ explanatory power.2 Moreover, we tested for
multicollinearity by estimating the variance inflation factor of the basic Cox model’s variables,
ranging from 1.32 to 2.63, precluding multicollinearity in the time series. We conducted these tests
through the statistical software R, version 4.1.1, using the simPH and the Companion to Applied
Regressions packages (Gandrud 2015; Fox and Weisberg 2019).
4.2. The Qualitative Analysis
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We deploy a comparative analysis of two gatekeeper OPCs, Chad and Venezuela. This qualitative
comparison allows us to process trace how the political regimes in these countries employ the
policies identified in the quantitative analysis to weather the political challenges arising during
economic crises. The criteria for our case selection were those gatekeeper OPCs that experienced
severe economic crises and exhibited low state capacity or a combination of low and medium-low
state capacity after 2014. These criteria eliminate all possible cases but Chad and Venezuela (see
Table 4).
The GDP per capita (at PPP, current USD) of Chad declined from 1,820 to 1,654 USD,
while Venezuela’s plummeted from 17,011 to 7,344 USD between 2015 and 2019
(https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/WEO, (10 May, 2021)). Both cases meet a
Most Different System Design as they differ in every category except for their inland oil reservoirs,
relatively similar population sizes, and the historically persistent military rule since independence
(Powell 2021; Bejarano 2011). Chad is a relatively young OPC, as the country joined this club in
2003 with the completion of the vital Doba-Kribi pipeline that enabled Chad to export crude oil
from southern Chad through Cameroon’s Gulf of Guinea (Gould and Winters 2012). Venezuela,
in contrast, represents one of the oldest OPCs globally, as oil rents became the main source of
governmental revenues in the 1940s (Karl 1997). Socioeconomically, Chad, a landlocked African
country, is one of the most underdeveloped countries globally; it exhibited during the 2010s an
exceptionally low urbanisation rate of about 23 per cent, unlike Venezuela’s 88 per cent (ColomJaén and Campos-Serrano 2013; https://data.worldbank.org/, (9 March, 2020).
Our comparative analysis of Chad and Venezuela offers a new addition to the limited crossregional scholarship between Africa and Latin America, small-N comparative research that has
proven highly advantageous for studies of political transition and civil war (Heller 2009; Wood
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2001). The sources employed for the qualitative analysis are derived from the secondary literature
and descriptive statistics.
5)
Analysing the Probability of Regime Change in 35 Major OPCs
This section presents and discusses the results of the Cox models, which estimate the probability
that the covariates of interest reduce the chances of regime change in 35 major OPCs during the oil
boom-bust period from 2011 to 2018.3 The hazard ratios or exponentiated coefficients below one
represent a decreased probability of regime change, meaning that regime survival is likelier and
vice versa. The concordance score of all models was 0.92 or above, indicating that the models are
a good fit for the data and that the models’ outputs are not random guesses.
[Table 5 around here]
Model 1 provides an interaction term between the neopatrimonialism and international
autonomy covariates to test our main hypothesis (H1). This interaction is statistically significant,
and its proportional hazards ratio is 0.03. As the difference to one is 0.97, this hazard ratio estimates
that a unit increment in both covariates decreased the average probability of regime change in the
analysed OPCs by 97 per cent during the boom-bust cycle between 2011 and 2018, while the other
covariates remained constant. However, adding to the complexity of interpreting interaction terms
is that the outcome variable is binary, making the statistical confidence interval neither sufficient
nor necessary to interpret any substantive results. Therefore, we provide marginal effects plots of
each interaction term to interpret any statistical and substantive significance of each model’s results
by visualising whether the conditioning effect of one covariate on another is different from zero
(Berry et al. 2010, 2012).4
[Table 6 around here]
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Figure 2 shows the marginal effects plots of all estimated interactions. The marginal effects
plot of Model 1 illustrates that a unit increase in the neopatrimonialism indicator led to a reduced
probability of regime change in OPCs, at any point between 2011 and 2018, with values of
international autonomy greater than 0.8, approximately. Therefore, this interaction term provides
statistically significant results, as one standard deviation from international autonomy’s mean
(1.16) for the studied period was between 0.39 and 1.93, which indicates that about two-thirds of
all observations lie in the negative marginal effect range. We can interpret from these results that
marginal increases in the neopatrimonialism and international autonomy covariates interact to
reduce the probability of regime change in the 35 analysed OPCs. Hence, these results confirm our
first hypothesis (H1). In other words, we find evidence to support the concept that a two-level
policy coordination increases the likelihood of regime survival by reducing the probability of
regime change.
[Figure 2 around here]
Model 2 estimates the interaction between neopatrimonialism and economic crisis to test
our first subsidiary hypothesis (H2). However, Model 2 shows a statistically insignificant
interaction effect between neopatrimonialism and the presence of an economic crisis (when this
variable’s score is one), as the 95 per cent confidence interval of the interaction term is not different
from zero. This interaction is also substantively insignificant, as the mean effects of a unit increase
in the neopatrimonialism indicator decrease the likelihood of regime change by about five times,
irrespective of whether an OPC underwent an economic crisis. These results lead us to reject the
second hypothesis.
Model 3 estimates the interaction between international autonomy and economic crisis to
test our second subsidiary hypothesis (H3). Model 3 illustrates that a marginal increase in the
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international autonomy indicator reduces the chances of regime change when an OPC is
undergoing an economic crisis. This interaction’s 95 per cent confidence interval is different from
zero when the economic crisis indicator is one, indicating a statistically significant interaction and
allowing us to confirm the third hypothesis. The interaction estimated above appeared statistically
insignificant in Table 6 (p-value=0.14). However, a binary outcome variable means that a
statistically significant p-value is neither sufficient nor necessary to interpret the results and
requires plotting the interaction’s marginal effects (Berry et al. 2010). It is important to note that
due to our relatively small sample (N=276), the 95 per cent confidence interval is broad because
of large standard errors, which does not allow us to accurately interpret the probability that this
interaction will reduce the chances of regime change. Nevertheless, these results point towards
international policies as a key variable for OPCs to survive periods of economic decline.
[Table 7 around here]
Furthermore, state capacity as a confounder was highly significant in the first three models
and depicted a hazard ratio between 0.17 and 0.24, suggesting that low state capacity makes certain
OPCs more susceptible to regime change. To assess the robustness of our results, we estimated in
Model 4 the interaction of international autonomy and state capacity, which showed that this
interaction is statistically and substantively significant after plotting its marginal effects, shown in
Figure 3. Hence, a unit increase in international autonomy when state capacity is very low – at a
value of one – increases the chances of regime survival since the hazard ratio is negative. Hence,
coordinating international and domestic policies to achieve regime survival appears crucial for neopatrimonial OPCs and those with very low capacity, such as gatekeeper OPCs, as we theoretically
expected.
[Figure 3 around here]
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Another theoretically relevant confounder was state violence. Individually, this confounder
was statistically insignificant except in Model 1 (p-value=0.09) and showed a negative hazard ratio,
meaning that increases in state violence appeared to reduce the chances of regime change. This
confounder is theoretically relevant to the domestic strategy of neopatrimonialism, as states
increase the use of violence when revenues to finance clientelist networks run low (Gandhi and
Przeworski 2006; Ross 2015). Hence, Model 5 estimates an interaction between neopatrimonialism
and state violence to test our model’s robustness further. This interaction’s marginal effect plot
shows a marginally substantive and positive interaction that departs from zero at state violence’s
values of 0.5 or less, meaning when state violence is high. Hence, it appears that increases in
neopatrimonialism somewhat reduce the chances of regime survival when state violence is high,
providing some evidence, but not conclusive, of a trade-off between the use of neo-patrimonial
strategies and state violence in the analysed OPCs.
Finally, we further test the robustness of models 1 and 3 in Models 6 through 9 with twopoint and four-point variations in the Polity indicator (instead of three-point variations) that
constitute an event of regime change. The analysis of Cox models and marginal effect plots of
Models 6 and 7 show very similar results to Models 1 and 3, thus showing the robustness of our
results with two-point variations. However, estimating the significant main models with four-point
variations, performed in Models 8 and 9, produces statistically insignificant results, thus limiting
the robustness of our results. The qualitative analysis in the following section provides a more
robust and nuanced test of the first and third hypotheses.
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6)
How Neo-Patrimonial OPCs Coordinate International and Domestic Policies
During Economic Crises: Evidence from Chad and Venezuela
Our statistical results confirm this paper’s main hypothesis that neo-patrimonial OPCs strategically
coordinate their domestic and international policies during economic crises to ensure regime
survival. This two-level policy calibration sees these regimes increasingly rely on their
international alliances to weather internal and external challenges mounted by opponents and
sustain vital clientelist mechanisms to maximise political support and executive power at home.
However, these results also indicate that the mere presence of an economic crisis does not condition
the effects of domestic policy (e.g., the deployment of neo-patrimonial mechanisms) to reduce the
chances of regime change. Therefore, the international policy is key for neo-patrimonial OPCs to
effectively navigate this two-level game and increase the likelihood of regime survival during
economic crises. This section provides a comparative qualitative analysis of the international
political economy of regime survival in Chad and Venezuela, two gatekeeper OPCs, or neopatrimonial OPCs with very low state capacity, which were particularly susceptible to domestic
and international challenges during the economic downturns after the 2014 international oil price
bust.
Our qualitative analysis further tests our first hypothesis by examining how the likelihood
of regime survival in gatekeeper OPCs depends on a strategic balancing act of international and
domestic policies. However, in this section, we further test our third hypothesis and show that
during periods of economic crisis, the international strategy is determinant for regime survival and
thus more substantively significant than the domestic strategy. The international strategy allows
OPCs to offset their low state capacity by securing vital foreign financial, military, and diplomatic
support. Specifically, the Chadian and Venezuelan regimes deepened their status quo and
20
revisionist foreign policies to leverage geopolitical tensions and “lock in” continued support from
key foreign allies to bolster their low state capacity. This strategic two-level policy coordination
helped curb threats from powerful domestic and external actors under severely adverse economic
conditions.
6.1. Chad: A Status-Quo Surrogate in the Sahel
A succession of autocratic strongmen ruled Chad since independence from France in 1960 (Powell
2021). The current regime came to power after Idriss Déby deposed Hissène Habré in 1990 and
just before Chad’s oil reserves started to develop for export as prices skyrocketed in 2003 (Tubiana
and Debos 2017). Oil revenues provided Déby with the financial wherewithal to consolidate a
regime comprised of the Chadian armed forces, the Armée National du Tchad (ANT), his elite
presidential guard, the Direction Générale de Service de Sécurité des Institutions de l’État
(DGSSIE), and multiple allied ethnic groups (Gould and Winters 2012; Colom-Jaén and CamposSerrano 2013; Marchal 2016). While Déby was killed unexpectedly in April 2021 during an ANT
operation against rebels from the Front pour l’alternance et la concorde au Tchad (FACT), the
Transitional Military Council chaired by his son, Mahamat Déby Itno, took over his father’s regime
and
has
retained
the
complete
support
of
key
political
stakeholders
(https://theconversation.com/legacy-of-chads-gatekeeper-politics-lives-on-beyond-deby-andcarries-grave-risks-160295, (4 January, 2022)).
Déby harnessed his country’s newfound oil wealth to expand the security forces
considerably while simultaneously repelling several challenges to his rule from disaffected groups.
Although he was the first president in Chad’s history to hold elections, Déby’s political party, the
Mouvement Patriotique du Salut, won consecutive electoral contests from the mid-1990s onwards
due to ‘the manipulation of the electoral processes and the extensive use of repression’ (Colom-
21
Jaén and Campos-Serrano 2013: 586). A constitutional amendment allowed Déby to seek
reelection in 2006, prompting Sudan-based rebels to make successive advances on N’Djamena in
2006 and 2008, which almost overthrew his regime if not for timely French military support (Debos
2011; Pemunta and Tabenyang 2016). Facing these threats, Déby reneged on his regime’s
agreement with the World Bank, which placed considerable budgetary discretion on oil revenues,
channelling these resources originally earmarked for health and education towards the expansion
of the ANT (Gould and Winters 2012).
After the temporary defeat of his rivals, Déby established a period of calm through the
clientelist redistribution of oil revenues, selectively distributing coveted positions to his supporters
and opponents alike (International Crisis Group 2016). Between 2010 and 2014, his regime
oversaw the growth of Chad’s military and civil service while belatedly raising public spending on
basic infrastructure and public services to address widespread poverty (CADH 2018; Debos 2011;
International Crisis Group 2016). Nevertheless, the ANT was the main beneficiary of this clientelist
spending by receiving close to one-third of the USD 13 billion in oil revenues earned between 2004
and 2015, converting Chad into a regional military power (Tubiana and Debos 2017; Gould and
Winters 2012).
The 2014 oil price collapse ended this period of peace and prosperity, which, coupled with
Déby’s economic mismanagement, ‘caused consecutive years of negative growth rates and split
the country’s largest source of revenue in half between 2014 and 2016’ (Eizenga 2018: 11). Déby
had borrowed heavily before the oil decline, a fiscal position that only worsened during the crisis,
with Chad’s gross debt as a share of GDP expanding from 39.5 to 49 per cent between 2014 and
2018
((https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/G_XWDG_G01_GDP_PT@FM/TCD,
(06
August, 2021)). In addition, the Chadian regime streamlined domestic rent deployment to weather
22
the crisis by drastically reducing public spending. These austerity measures provoked nationwide
protests and strikes, particularly before and after the heavily manipulated 2016 presidential
election, which Déby unsurprisingly won (CADH 2018; Marchal 2016; Pemunta and Tabenyang
2016). Following the new constitution’s approval in 2018, further consolidating Déby’s power, he
again
won
a
deeply
flawed
election
in
April
2021,
days
before
his
death
(https://www.cfr.org/blog/chad-holds-another-sham-election, (4 January, 2022).
Even though Déby’s regime reduced public spending to offset the loss in state revenue, it
was careful not to cut military budgets. Prioritizing the loyalty of the security forces over struggling
popular sectors, Déby diversified the ANT by promoting officers from various regional and ethnic
backgrounds to top-ranking positions while recruiting thousands of new troops (Tubiana and Debos
2017). Beyond the ANT, Déby reconfigured the power centres within his regime by expanding the
DGSSIE, led by one of his sons and two nephews (Marchal 2016). Déby also gave cabinet positions
and public contracts to his numerous family members to ‘fill his government with allies, bridge
ethnic divides, and control Chad’s key industries’ (https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/01/bokoharam-islamist-terrorists-strike-chad-while-world-distracted-by-coronavirus/, (1 July, 2020)).
Additionally, Déby awarded control of alternative revenue sources, such as control of lucrative
trade routes with Cameroon and Nigeria and informal gold mining in Tibesti, to members of the
security services to ensure their continued loyalty (International Crisis Group 2019a). In doing so,
Déby maintained the regime’s high degree of neopatrimonialism while offsetting the declining
state capacity that resulted from the oil price bust, illustrated in Figure 4.5
[Figure 4 around here]
More than streamlining rent deployment or diversifying revenue streams, Déby’s ability to
leverage his country’s strong ties with key status-quo powers such as France and the United States
23
enabled his regime to weather the economic crisis beyond his death. The expansion of the ANT
and the DGSSIE at this juncture served to buttress Déby’s position at home. They raised Chad’s
geopolitical status in the region as ‘a strategic outpost for France and the United States in the fight
against
Islamist
militants
across
the
Sahel
and
Boko
Haram
in
Nigeria’
(https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/chads-strategic-interest-france-western-allies-2021-04-20/,
(4 January, 2022). Beyond the jihadist threat, China and Russia’s regional footprint has grown
considerably during this period, raising the value of Chad’s loyalty to its key Western allies even
further, particularly considering the Malian coup d’État in 2021, which effectively saw Bamako
replace French troops with Russian military contractors to combat Islamic extremists in the Sahel
(https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/west-africa/2022-03-10/macrons-mess-sahel, (19 April
2022)). Using this dynamic to his advantage, Déby secured continued military, economic, and
diplomatic support from foreign allies to help defeat various domestic challenges to his rule while
silencing any potential international criticism about human rights violations, electoral fraud, and
extreme corruption (Tubiana and Debos 2017; International Crisis Group 2016). This international
strategy slightly compromised Chad’s international autonomy after 2016 but allowed the Déby
regime to leverage its geopolitical positioning to compensate for its reduced state capacity.
After the 2014 oil price bust, the Chadian regime received emergency loans and
considerable debt relief from the IMF and the World Bank, economic assistance that has helped
Déby’s regime overcome the worst effects of the economic crisis, as the national economy showed
modest recovery signs after 2018 ((https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/FM/1, (12
June, 2020); Marchal 2016). Of equal importance, Déby’s foreign allies have provided him with
substantial military support to help protect his regime from domestic rivals seeking to overthrow
him (https://theconversation.com/legacy-of-chads-gatekeeper-politics-lives-on-beyond-deby-andcarries-grave-risks-160295, (4 January, 2022)). Tellingly, the FACT rebel incursion credited with
24
killing Déby had reportedly been trained and received support from Moscow-backed Libyan
warlord Khalifa Haftar (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/world/africa/idriss-deby-chadobituary.html, (5 January, 2022)).
Since Chad’s independence, France retained considerable influence over its former African
colonies and viewed Chad as an indispensable military ally to combat threats in the Sahel posed by
Islamist insurgents (Marchal 2016). From 2013 onwards, Chad contributed thousands of troops to
two French-led military interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic. These deployments
successfully protected both incumbent governments from Islamist militant groups, forcing thenFrench president François Hollande to maintain support for Déby’s autocratic regime despite his
previous reservations (Chafer 2019). The following year, France launched Operation Barkhane to
combat foreign jihadist groups in northern Mali and established its main base of operations in
N’Djamena. In return, Déby committed thousands of Chadian troops to multilateral missions in
Mali, the Lake Chad Basin, and the regional counterterrorism group, the G5 Sahel Joint Force, in
the following years (Eizenga 2018; International Crisis Group 2017, 2019a).
France, in turn, rewarded Déby for his commitment to combatting Islamist extremism in
the Sahel with a robust security guarantee that included using its air force to attack rebel convoys
inside of Chadian territory (https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/chad-frances-role-andpolitical-instability-23842, (5 January, 2022)). Apart from the thousands of French troops
permanently stationed at Operation Barkhane’s main base in N’Djamena, France also maintains
two other forward operating bases to monitor potential threats emanating from Libya, Sudan, and
the Central African Republic, incidentally three countries where Russia has increased its presence
(https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/chads-strategic-interest-france-western-allies-2021-04-20/,
25
(4 January, 2022)). Beyond the battlefield, Paris has gone so far as to freeze the financial assets of
Déby’s political rivals to placate its Sahelian ally (Tubiana and Debos 2017).
However, the French security guarantee has locked successive presidents into the survival
of Déby’s regime. As Marchal notes, ‘France is a prisoner of its relations with Chad, more than
Chad is a prisoner of its relations with France’ ((https://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/chadfrances-role-and-political-instability-23842, (5 January, 2022)). Tellingly, President Macron
attended Déby’s state funeral in N’Djamena and sat next to the late president’s son and successor,
Mahamat
Déby
((https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/23/chad-holds-presidential-funeral-
despite-rebel-threat, (16 August, 2021)).
While the United States lacks France’s colonial baggage in Chad, it has nevertheless been
drawn into its internal affairs due to geopolitics, oil, and Islamist extremism’s recent rise in the
Sahel. Chad is strategically located ‘at the crossroads of most major conflicts in Africa where the
United States currently has a security interest, if not an actual operational presence,’ simultaneously
representing ‘a good opportunity for Russia, both to harm Western interests and to gain access to
West and Central Africa’ (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/africasource/washingtons-roleand-responsibility-in-chad/ (7 January, 2022); https://english.alaraby.co.uk/analysis/how-russiacould-capitalise-chads-instability, (6 January, 2022)). Over the past decade, Déby’s regime
strengthened its ties with Washington by actively combatting jihadists in the Sahel and, more
importantly, in those countries located in the Gulf of Guinea where American companies have
substantial investments in the energy sector.
From 2015 onwards, the Chadian military has played a central role in dislodging Boko
Haram from strategic spaces in Northern Nigeria and has leveraged this role to ‘gain support and
recognition
from
Western
nations’
(https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-
26
chaos/2021/04/29/the-death-of-chadian-president-idris-deby-itno-threatens-stability-in-theregion/ (4 January, 2022); https://www.cfr.org/blog/chad-holds-another-sham-election, (7 January,
2022)). Previous American presidents viewed the Sahel largely as France’s domain, yet
‘Washington’s regional security interests are now equally as bound to what unfolds in Chad’
(https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/africasource/washingtons-role-and-responsibility-in-chad/
(7 January, 2022)). Moreover, the United States views Déby’s regime as an indispensable
counterterror ally, with Chad playing host to several American military advisors and military
installations that are central to the U.S. military’s Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) deployments
on the continent (https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/u-s-military-says-it-has-a-light-footprint-inafrica-these-documents-show-a-vast-network-of-bases/
(5
January,
2022);
(https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/chads-strategic-interest-france-western-allies-2021-04-20/,
(4 January, 2022)).
Beyond Chad’s traditional alliances with status-quo powers, Déby demonstrated strategic
flexibility by brokering new alliances to support his embattled regime after 2014. In recent years,
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged millions of dollars in military assistance
towards Chadian counterterror operations in the Greater Sahel, while Déby simultaneously reestablished diplomatic ties with Israel in exchange for arms and security cooperation against
Islamist
extremists
(https://de.reuters.com/article/uk-chad-israel-rapprochement-
idUKKCN1PE0OW, (3 August 2020)). Beyond state actors, the Chadian regime also fortified
alliances with transnational ethnic groups present in Chad’s border regions with Sudan, Libya,
Niger, and the Central African Republic to deter any potential challenges originating in Chad’s
expansive and vulnerable peripheral regions (Tubiana and Debos 2017).
27
6.2. Venezuela: A Revisionist Challenger in the Americas
While oil rents paved the way for Venezuela’s democratic transition from 1958 onwards, the
quality of the country’s democratic institutions and oil productivity began to decline after the mid1970s, following the nationalisation of Venezuela’s oil industry with the creation of Petróleos de
Venezuela, SA (PDVSA) in 1976 (Karl 1997). The 1998 election of former military officer Hugo
Chávez only accelerated the country’s democratic backsliding further. Under the new regime, the
Venezuelan military, or the Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana (FANB), became a key
stakeholder, and Chávez was able to further consolidate his power after surviving a failed coup, a
nationwide strike, and a recall referendum between 2002 and 2004 (Corrales and Penfold 2015).
Chávez forged a regime that was ‘a marriage of radicals and officers’ (Corrales 2014: 371),
a mix of the FANB and civilian activists hailing from pre-existing left-wing political parties and
labour unions. Confronted by an ineffective political opposition, he gradually converted Venezuela
into a competitive authoritarian OPC by removing virtually all checks and balances on executive
power (Corrales and Penfold 2015). This democratic regression was made possible due to the oil
boom between 2004 and 2014, as oil-financed clientelist public spending and mechanisms of oil
rent multiplication, such as currency exchange and capital controls, ensured a majoritarian electoral
base through the formation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) in 2007 (Lupien
2015; Hawkins 2016). Since 2013, Nicolás Maduro, handpicked by Chávez just before his death,
has led Venezuela and oversaw Venezuela’s transition from a competitive authoritarian to a fully
authoritarian OPC.
The ascendance of Nicolas Maduro in 2013 coincided with the decline of PSUV’s electoral
appeal, rapidly declining oil production, and the international oil price bust of 2014, all of which
forced the Chavista regime to severely streamline rent deployment to popular sectors (Bahar et al.
28
2018). As a result, the regime scaled back non-excludable subsidies of basic goods and services
and distributed dwindling resources to key political loyalists instead, leading to a dramatic rise in
food insecurity and the annual inflation rate skyrocketing from 62 per cent in 2014 to a crippling
65 thousand per cent in 2018, a key factor behind the recent mass exodus of millions of
Venezuelans
from
their
country
(Larratt-Smith
and
Leon
2022;
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/datasets/FM/1, (12 June, 2020)).
Deprived of the necessary state resources to maintain its majoritarian electoral base, the
ruling PSUV lost control of the legislative branch for the first time in 2015, ceding two-thirds of
seats
to
the
opposition
party
coalition
in
an
unprecedented
electoral
rejection
of chavismo. Consequently, the Maduro regime enacted multiple measures that created numerous
obstacles to any meaningful future electoral competition (Corrales 2020). Furthermore, Maduro’s
regime reacted to mounting public discontent by deploying the security forces to quell these mass
mobilisations forcefully (Leon 2022). The opposition-controlled legislature launched a campaign
in January 2019 to remove Maduro from office by claiming that the legislative leader, Juan Guaidó,
was the legitimate president. These controversial efforts garnered substantial support from
international status-quo powers in the form of diplomatic isolation and economic
sanctions (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/venezuela-military/,
(2
July,
2019)).
Despite these severe measures, the Maduro regime has managed to weather the ensuing
turbulence and retain firm control of executive power by streamlining domestic rent deployment
to key allies and diversifying those nodal points connecting the country’s economy to the outside
world. To guarantee the continued support of the FANB after the onset of the economic crisis,
Maduro has dramatically increased the number of generals in the military and replaced many
29
longstanding civilian stalwarts of the Chavista regime in prominent cabinet positions and stateowned industries with these military officials (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/specialreport/venezuela-military/, (2 July, 2019)). Furthermore, Maduro has permitted and even
encouraged the development of alternative revenue sources, including illicit drug trafficking,
gasoline smuggling, and gold mining in natural reserves, to compensate for declining state revenues
and to keep rents flowing to the regime’s key stakeholders (Polga-Hecimovich 2019; International
Crisis Group 2019b). In 2015, the Obama administration imposed targeted sanctions on elite
Venezuelan policymakers accused of drug trafficking and human rights violations
(https://www.wola.org/analysis/venezuela-sanctions-takeaways/, (9 April, 2020)). These punitive
measures worsened considerably from 2019 onwards, as the Trump administration imposed a series
of wide-ranging sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry in conjunction with the political
opposition’s
unsuccessful
campaign
to
force
Maduro
from
power (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/venezuela-military/, (2 July, 2019)).
[Figure 5 around here]
However, the incumbent Venezuelan government has largely survived these domestic and
international challenges due to its crucial foreign alliances that share revisionist ambitions on the
global stage. Under Chávez’s watch, Venezuela dramatically redrew its foreign policy by
distancing itself from the United States while simultaneously developing greater ties to regional
and international revisionist states seeking to promote a multipolar international system such as
China, Cuba, Russia, and Iran (Rouvinski 2021; Oner 2021; Fonseca and Polga-Hecimovich 2021;
Kaplan
and
Penfold
2021).
This
geopolitical
realignment
drastically
escalated
the Chavista regime’s conflict with the United States and other status-quo countries. This dynamic
has only intensified under Maduro, as Venezuela has deepened ties with key revisionist allies, an
30
alignment that has proven mutually beneficial for all. For Maduro’s regional and international
partners, Venezuela has continued to provide a strategic counterbalance to the United States and
its allies throughout the Americas. As in the Chadian case, the international strategy of leveraging
geopolitical rivalries meant a slight loss of international autonomy, shown in Figure 5.6
Nevertheless, the benefits of these revisionist alliances have helped the regime overcome its
increased isolation in the region and beyond, enabling Maduro to remain in power through access
to foreign loans and vital transfers of repressive expertise.
In the face of a massive economic contraction, Venezuela’s allies served as a crucial source
of foreign capital, especially given the historically poor relations between chavismo and
mainstream international lending institutions. Between 2014 and 2018, the Maduro regime sought
international loans to make up for dwindling oil revenues to continue financing its clientelism
mechanisms at home. During this period, Venezuela’s gross debt position as a share of GDP
expanded from 25 to 181 per cent, much of this coming in the form of loans from economically
powerful
allies
such
as
China
Russia ((https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/G_XWDG_G01_GDP_PT@FM/VEN,
and
(06
August, 2021)). Ironically, by deepening Venezuela’s economic dependence on key revisionist
partners abroad, Maduro has also locked these superpowers into their bilateral commitments to his
beleaguered regime to guarantee their eventual repayment. While China and Russia have
substantial geopolitical motives to support a revisionist state so close to American soil, given their
rivalries with the United States, both countries are also clearly looking to protect their substantial
investments in Venezuela.
In the early 2010s, Venezuela accounted for 64 per cent of Chinese foreign direct
investment in Latin America, yet the increasingly macroeconomic instability under Maduro has
31
forced Beijing to reconsider its financial ties there. However, billions of dollars in Chinese loans
underwritten with PDVSA futures as collateral hindered China’s attempts to reduce its exposure in
Venezuela, thereby binding Beijing to the survival of Maduro’s regime. Kaplan and Penfold (2021:
98) note: ‘China was entangled by a creditor trap in Venezuela, much more than Venezuela was
caught in a debt trap by China.’ As such, China has remained ‘the Maduro government’s primary
economic lifeline’ throughout the economic crisis, an enormously risky political and economic
commitment for the Chinese government, but one that gives it greater influence in the Americas to
strategically serve ‘as a counterweight to US influence in East Asia (especially Southeast Asia)’
(Ferchen 2020: 12, 16).
Apart from China, Russia finds itself ensnared in a similar creditor trap with Venezuela,
having provided Caracas with 20 billion USD in loans whose eventual repayment is tied to the
Maduro regime’s continued survival. Furthermore, the Russian energy consortium Rosneft became
increasingly involved in producing and distributing Venezuelan oil in recent years until this
commercial relationship ended abruptly in 2020 due to direct US sanctions. Despite these mounting
difficulties, Putin’s government is unwilling to lose its investment or abandon an ally that provides
Russia with a foothold in the Americas (Rouvinski 2021). Of equal importance, Russia (along with
China and Iran) have drawn on their own extensive experiences countering American economic
power and has helped the Maduro regime circumvent cumbersome US sanctions over the past three
years (Rendon and Fernandez 2020).
Apart from financial support, Maduro’s international allies have provided a wealth of
repressive expertise and diplomatic support to offset the mounting internal and external challenges
due to its weakened state capacity. Venezuela’s state capacity was already in decline when Maduro
came to power, but the further collapse of state capacities after an oil price bust due to the
32
economy’s overdependency on oil rents was foreseeable (Freije 2014). Since the failed 2002 coup
against Chávez, the Cuban intelligence service has helped to revamp the Venezuelan intelligence
services, particularly the military counterintelligence agency (Ginter 2013). Under Maduro,
intelligence cooperation with Cuba has continued in exchange for oil payments, as ‘intelligence
and counterintelligence—likely provided by both Venezuelan and Cuban personnel—are
particularly important for the president to snuff out threats to his power’ from within the military
and civilian politicians allied with or opposing the regime (Fonseca and Polga-Hecimovich 2021:
122). The mutual dependency between Cuba and Venezuela has only deepened under Maduro’s
watch, as the former ‘has arguably done more than any other state to secure Maduro’s grasp on
power,’ even though Cuba remains ‘so dependent on Venezuela that the possibility of a political
transition there represents an existential threat to the Castro regime’ (Rendon and Fernandez 2020:
7).
Similarly, the Putin regime staunchly backed Maduro during the ongoing crisis by
supplying him with military advisors, private contractors, and S-300 surface-to-air missiles in
response to the escalation of US support for the Venezuelan opposition since 2019. Russia’s actions
are a show of support for its revisionist South American ally that ‘intends to demonstrate Moscow’s
great power reach, thwart US policy in its hemisphere, and underscore that a multipolar world will
replace the era of American predominance’ (https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-researchreports/report/russias-intervention-in-venezuela-whats-at-stake/, (28 July, 2020). Russia does not
possess the financial wherewithal to sustain the Venezuelan regime on its own. Yet, its continued
political, economic, and military support suggests that Venezuela has leveraged its geostrategic
value to Moscow to the extent that Russia is ‘the only major external power not willing to consider
a post-Maduro Venezuela’ (Rouvinski 2021: 45).
33
In the interim, Venezuela’s government has also developed new alliances with states
seeking to challenge the status quo international order in exchange for loans, repressive expertise,
support to circumvent American sanctions, and developing alternative non-oil-based revenue
streams that proved crucial to maintaining the inner regime’s cohesion. For example, since 2016,
Maduro and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have developed closer ties based on their
mutual suspicion of the United States. During this period, ‘Turkey has emerged as the linchpin of
the Venezuelan gold trade, providing Maduro with a much-needed source of revenue at a time of
shrinking oil revenues and comprehensive US sanctions’ (Oner 2021: 174; Rendon and
Fernandez 2020). Additionally, Maduro has increased dependence on revisionist armed non-state
allies to augment its’ increasingly weakening territorial control in the Venezuelan periphery.
Over the past decade, the Venezuelan government has developed close ties with two Colombian
insurgent groups, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and the Segunda Marquetalia
FARC dissident faction. These relationships provided these foreign guerrillas with a strategic
refuge in Venezuela while allowing Maduro to counterbalance the Colombian government, a
staunch US ally and one of his biggest regional opponents (Larratt-Smith 2021).
7)
Conclusion
Our quantitative findings confirm that neo-patrimonial OPCs survive prolonged economic crises
by skilfully calibrating their domestic and international policies, although the latter is key to their
ability to weather these turbulent boom-bust cycles. At home, embattled regimes depend on
clientelist mechanisms to secure the loyalty of key actors and elite groups to stave off domestic and
international challenges during periods of prosperity and stagnation. Nevertheless, during severe
economic crises, when resources are scarce, and pressures begin to mount, the need for neopatrimonial OPCs to secure crucial aid from foreign allies becomes particularly acute. Our
34
quantitative analysis found that increasing international autonomy during economic crises
increases the chances of regime survival. However, our qualitative analysis provided important
nuance. The ability of neo-patrimonial OPCs to navigate international geopolitics and leverage
global fault lines ultimately determines their survival or collapse. Hence, Chad and Venezuela, two
gatekeeper OPCs, slightly compromised their international autonomy during the post-2014
economic crisis, allowing their regimes to survive diverse challenges to their power.
Our qualitative comparative analysis of Chad and Venezuela demonstrates the importance
of the ‘two-level game’ between domestic politics and the international sphere. In contrast to what
much of the International Relation’s literature suggests, our analysis shows that these two
gatekeeper OPCs are far from passive actors in international politics. Rather, they leverage their
geopolitical alignment, whether status-quo or revisionist, and positioning in the international order
to extract the necessary financial, military, and diplomatic support from their allies to bolster
domestic capacities. This timely assistance ultimately enables these beleaguered regimes to stave
off domestic and international challenges to their rule, which inevitably arise when resources run
low, adversely impacting rent deployment.
Incumbent rulers in Chad and Venezuela responded to the 2014 international oil price bust
by prioritizing the redistribution of scarce state resources to elite groups capable of staving off
coups, revolutions, and external interventions (e.g., the security services). Beyond these measures,
the Déby and Maduro regimes leveraged their international allies’ geopolitical conflicts to their
benefit to access the foreign capital and military support required to offset their deteriorating state
capacity. Echoing recent works on hegemonic power alliances, Chad’s geopolitical alignment with
status-quo powers appears to have proven more beneficial than Venezuela’s with revisionist ones.
35
Hopefully, future research will further explore this topic on OPCs and international geopolitical
alliances.
This article contributes to the rich literature on authoritarian resilience and cross-regional
studies of resource-rich countries in the Global South (Escribà-Folch and Wright 2015; Gandhi and
Przeworski 2007; Smith 2006). Our findings offer two analytically promising yet understudied
avenues of exploration for scholars of Comparative Politics, International Development, and
International Relations. First, the existing scholarship on OPCs generally focuses on the political
economy of rentierism and authoritarianism. However, there is a demonstrable need to examine
further the variation between democratic and autocratic regimes in the wider universe of cases and
analyse the dramatic differences between authoritarian OPCs, an important distinction that we have
highlighted in this work. Second, International Relations studies of status-quo and revisionist states
generally limit their scope to great powers in the international system (Chan et al. 2019; Cooley et
al. 2021; Casey 2020). As the cases of Chad and Venezuela demonstrate, the geopolitical alignment
of low-capacity states similarly has profound effects, both positive and negative, on regional
stability while also playing a key role in promoting or opposing hegemonic projects such as the
prohibitive international regime against illicit drugs or the global campaign against Islamist
extremist groups.
Endnotes
1
All tables created by the authors with data sources explained in the research design section. We
converted the ‘neopatrimonialism’ and ‘state capacity’ indicators into a five-point scale. Low (one)
or High (five) indicate scores of the original indicator below or above one or half a standard
deviation from the yearly mean of the 35 analysed OPCs from 2011 to 2018, respectively.
Similarly, Medium-Low (2) or Medium-High (4) indicate scores below or above one-half from a
36
standard deviation from the mean, respectively, but no greater than one. Medium scores (3) lie
within one-half standard deviation from the mean. Furthermore, we excluded Brunei due to
incomplete data.
2
Figure created by the authors using the Survminer package by Alboukadel Kassambara through
the R Statistical Software, version 4.1.1.
3
All models in Tables 6 and 7 are Cox proportional hazards models providing the exponentiated
coefficient (hazard ratios) and their robust standard errors in parentheses. We created the tables
with data specified in the research design section and analysed through the statistical software R,
version 4.1.1, using the Survival package (Therneau and Grambsch 2000).
4
We created all interactions’ marginal effect plots with data specified in the research design section
and visualised through the statistical software R, version 4.1.1, using the simPH package (Gandrud
2015).
5
Figure created by the authors. We transformed to coefficients for visualisation purposes.
6
See endnote 5.
37
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Figure 1. Deviance residuals of the basic Cox model
47
Figure 2. Marginal effect plots for the interactions in Models 1 through 3
48
Figure 3. Marginal effect plots for the interactions in Models 4 through 9
49
Figure 4. Descriptive statistics of key variables for Chad
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Economic Crisis
Neopatrimonialism
State Capacity
State Violence
2016
2017
2018
International Autonomy
50
Figure 5. Descriptive statistics of key variables for Venezuela
1.00
0.90
0.80
0.70
0.60
0.50
0.40
0.30
0.20
0.10
0.00
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
Economic Crisis
Neopatrimonialism
International Autonomy
State Capacity
State Violence
2017
2018
51
Table 1. Liberal Democratic and Hybrid OPCs
OPC
Colombia
Ecuador
Ghana
Malaysia
Mexico
Nigeria
Norway
Surinam
Trinidad and
Tobago
Tunisia
State Capacity
M-High
M -High
Medium
Medium
Medium
Medium
High
Medium
Medium-High (201114); High (2015-18)
M-High
Economic Crisis Regime Type
Hybrid
Hybrid
Liberal Democracy
Electoral Autocracy
Hybrid
Hybrid
Liberal Democracy
Hybrid
Hybrid
Hybrid
Neopatrimonialism
Low
Medium
Low
Medium-Low
Low
Medium-Low
Low
Low
Low
Low
52
Table 2. Absolutist OPCs
OPC
Gabon
Iran
Kuwait
Oman
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
United Arab
Emirates
State Capacity
Economic Crisis
High
Medium-High
2012-2015
Medium
High
2016-2018
Medium-High
2015-2016
Med.-High (2011-16);
Medium (2017-18)
Regime Type
Electoral Autocracy
Electoral Autocracy
Closed Autocracy
Closed Autocracy
Closed Autocracy
Neopatrimonialism
Medium
Medium
Low
Medium-Low
Medium
Closed Autocracy
Medium
High
Closed Autocracy
Medium-Low
53
Table 3. Neo-Patrimonial OPCs
OPC
Algeria
Angola
Azerbaijan
Bahrain
Cameroon
Egypt
Congo
Brazzaville
State Capacity
Medium
Medium
Medium-Low
Low (2011-13); MLow (2014-18)
Med.-Low (2011-15);
Low (2016-18)
Medium-Low
Medium-Low
Low (2011-15); Med.Iraq
Low (2016-18)
Kazakhstan Medium
Libya
Low
Russia
Medium
South Sudan Low
Sudan
Medium-Low
Yemen
Low
Economic Crisis Regime Type
Electoral Autocracy
2016-2018
Electoral Autocracy
2016-2018
Electoral Autocracy
Neopatrimonialism
Medium-High
Medium-High
High
2015-2016
Medium-High
Closed Autocracy
Electoral Autocracy Medium-High
Electoral Autocracy Medium-High
2015-2018
Electoral Autocracy Medium-High
2016-2018
Electoral Autocracy
Electoral Autocracy
Closed Autocracy
Electoral Autocracy
Closed Autocracy
Electoral Autocracy
Electoral Autocracy
2014-2016
2016-2018
2017-2018
2015-2018
Medium-Low
Medium-High
Medium-Low
Medium-High
Medium-High
Medium-High
Medium-High
54
Table 4. Gatekeeper OPCs
OPC
State Capacity
Economic Crisis Regime Type
Neopatrimonialism
Med.-Low (201116); Low (2017-18) 2016-2018
Electoral Autocracy High
Chad
Equatorial
Guinea
Medium-Low
2016-2018
Turkmenistan Low
Med.-Low (2011Venezuela
16); Low (2017-18) 2016-2018
Electoral Autocracy High
Electoral Autocracy High
Electoral Autocracy High
55
Table 5. Summary statistics
Variable
Regime Change
Neopatrimonialism
International Autonomy
Economic Crisis
State Capacity
Regime Type
Oil Prices
Oil Rents
State Violence
Mean
–
0.673
1.156
–
2.839
1.068
81.481
16.160
0.516
SD
–
0.266
0.768
–
1.221
0.798
27.362
14.524
0.286
Min.
0
0.010
-1.293
0
1
0
43.640
0.791
0.052
Max.
1
0.983
2.078
1
5
3
111.630
61.199
0.984
Events
44
–
–
71
–
–
–
–
–
56
Table 6. Results of the main models in 35 major OPCs, 2011-2018
Dependent variable:
(1)
Regime Change
(2)
(3)
Neopatrimonialism
-1.631
(1.862)
-5.219***
(1.354)
-5.008***
(1.227)
International Autonomy
2.688*
(1.247)
-0.260
(0.273)
-0.093
(0.294)
Economic Crisis
-0.331
(0.534)
-0.644
(2.019)
0.026
(0.516)
State Capacity
-1.762*** -1.442***
(0.450)
(0.386)
-1.445***
(0.379)
Regime Type
-0.349
(0.331)
-0.395
(0.378)
-0.401
(0.339)
Oil Prices
0.070***
(0.017)
0.077***
(0.017)
0.078***
(0.017)
Oil Rents
-0.007
(0.015)
-0.027**
(0.013)
-0.021
(0.013)
State Violence
-2.245+
(1.339)
-1.187
(1.258)
-1.097
(1.256)
Neopatrimonialism*International Autonomy
Neopatrimonialism*Economic Crisis
International Autonomy*Economic Crisis
Observations
Concordance
Wald Test (df = 9)
LR Test (df = 9)
Score (Logrank) Test (df = 9)
Note: +p<0.1; *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001
-3.484*
(1.416)
0.958
(2.612)
-0.870
(0.590)
276
276
276
0.926
0.923
0.929
***
***
62.050
64.330
65.230***
***
***
107.766 101.459
103.644***
101.654*** 101.975*** 100.432***
57
Table 7. Results of the robustness tests models in 35 major OPCs, 2011-2018
Dependent variable:
Regime Change Regime ∆ (2-point ∆) Regime ∆ (4-point ∆)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
Neopatrimonialism
-4.203*** -6.403***
(1.259) (2.064)
-1.862
(1.813)
-5.086***
(1.198)
1.925
(3.849)
-2.478
(1.821)
International Autonomy
-1.533** -0.368
(0.529) (0.275)
2.553*
(1.197)
-0.046
(0.287)
2.972
(2.180)
0.149
(0.459)
Economic Crisis
-0.082
(0.495)
-0.335
(0.524)
-0.002
(0.513)
-0.114
(1.256)
-0.242
(1.496)
-1.538*
(0.624)
-1.302*
(0.536)
State Capacity
0.158
(0.477)
-2.720*** -1.332*** -1.748*** -1.465***
(0.800) (0.374) (0.430)
(0.366)
Regime Type
-0.343
(0.338)
-0.272
(0.358)
-0.430
(0.325)
-0.488
(0.330)
-0.293
(0.520)
-0.464
(0.507)
Oil Prices
0.076*** 0.078***
(0.017) (0.017)
0.070***
(0.017)
0.078***
(0.016)
0.134+
(0.070)
0.138+
(0.072)
Oil Rents
-0.023+
(0.013)
-0.031*
(0.014)
-0.009
(0.014)
-0.021
(0.013)
0.009
(0.021)
-0.003
(0.019)
State Violence
-2.014
(1.323)
-3.242
(2.701)
-1.875
(1.289)
-0.770
(1.209)
-0.003
(2.027)
0.781
(1.931)
International Autonomy*State Capacity
Neopatrimonialism*State Violence
Neopatrimonialism*International Autonomy
International Autonomy*Economic Crisis
Observations
Concordance
Wald Test (df = 9)
LR Test (df = 9)
Score (Logrank) Test (df = 9)
Note: +p<0.1; *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001
1.041**
(0.426)
3.274
(3.877)
-3.288*
(1.364)
-3.432
(2.546)
-0.904
(0.585)
276
276
276
276
276
0.929
0.927
0.923
0.925
0.919
67.96*** 65.57*** 62.20*** 65.86***
14.47
***
***
***
***
109.16 102.06 106.81
103.14
37.51***
***
***
***
***
126.18 108.26 100.75
99.45
30.79***
0.103
(2.017)
276
0.915
14.73*
35.54***
31.71***
Daniel S Leon