This book has investigated how authoritarian regimes grapple with financial crises. I argue that different coalitions of regime supporters yield predictably different adjustment policy responses, which in turn have powerful impacts on regime survival. Coalitions vary according to their economic profiles. I study the preferences of three types of economic actors that can support nondemocratic regimes – mobile capital, fixed capital, and labor – and argue that the twin pressures of an insolvent banking sector and currency depreciation put the interests of mobile capital at odds with fixed capital and labor. The key is mobile capital's ability to redeploy assets abroad in response to poor economic conditions or unfavorable economic policies at home. Both fixed capital and labor, unable to divest and move overseas, will welcome capital account restrictions to facilitate expansionary macroeconomic policies. Accordingly, mobile capital prefers an open capital account with neutral macroeconomic policy (orthodoxy), whereas fixed capital and labor prefer a closed capital account with interventionist macroeconomic policy (heterodoxy). Across financial crises in emerging markets, we observe struggles over adjustment policy that follow this split between holders of fixed capital – often in alliance with labor, or strategically forming “nationalist” or “populist” alliances – and mobile capital, usually painted as disloyal, manipulative, or unpatriotic.

When authoritarian regimes have support coalitions that include both mobile and fixed capital, they face mutually incompatible adjustment policy pressures. Adjustment policy conflict in such regimes ultimately brings them down, with the support coalition fracturing across the cleavage of mobile capital versus fixed capital.