I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.

Chapter 4 focuses on labor migration from Central Asia to Russia as the first exclusionary migration cycle. Growing migration after 2000 made Russia one of the world’s major migrant-receiving states. The chapter explains why Putin retained a visa-free regime with the much poorer former Soviet states of CA, allowing millions of their citizens free entry to Russia, where most stayed and worked with undocumented status. As the numbers of the ethnically distant Muslim migrants rose, welfare nationalist grievances emerged in the cities and regions where migrants were concentrated. Citing public opinion surveys, speeches by mayors and governors, election and party platforms, and mass media, the chapter shows how politicians framed and used welfare nationalist discourses to placate citizens and scapegoat migrants for declines in popular welfare. It highlights the role of sub-national officials in mobilizing anti-immigrant politics and channeling pressures for exclusionary policies to Putin. These pressures produced legislative and normative changes that progressively excluded migrant families from social sectors and subjected workers to increasing abuses, including deportations and other forms of exclusion. A sub-set of migrants who contributed to Russia’s national security were treated as more deserving.

This introductory chapter presents the puzzle of the variation in agrarian elites’ capacity to organize electoral representation across Latin America after the third wave of democratization and discusses the consequences of this variation for redistributive politics. It summarizes the book’s central argument that agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence are explained by two factors: the perception of an existential threat and the level of intragroup fragmentation. Then, it discusses the relevance of that argument for the comparative politics literature, in particular regarding the relationship among economic elites’ representation, democratic consolidation, and redistribution. The chapter also offers background about a series of structural and political transformations that have changed agrarian elites’ sources of power in Latin America over the last six decades and describes my research methods, case selection strategy, and data sources.

Chapter 4 opens up the black box of the firm to assess the effects of leadership on reform outcomes in China Infrastructure (CI) (pseudonym), a central SOE in the construction industry. The chapter features paired comparisons of the consecutive tenures of chairmen in CI and process tracing of original data gathered during fifteen months of fieldwork inside the company, primarily in its Beijing headquarters, between January 2014 and June 2016, with follow-up visits in June 2018, December 2019, and December 2023. It presents evidence that the chairman’s leadership generated variation in the degree to which market expansion was decentralized and in the balance of influence among intra-firm actors. The chapter also evaluates and rules out alternative explanations: guanxi with and intervention by higher-level officials, shifts in policy by administrative superiors, and changes in industry competition in domestic and international markets.

Chapter 5 examines the effects of leadership on reform outcomes in four other central SOEs: State Grid, China General Nuclear Power Group, Sinochem, and China Railway Engineering Corporation. These companies are selected to capture full variation along two key dimensions: industry strategic importance and firm type. For each of these four central SOEs, the chapter compares the consecutive tenures of their chairmen to assess the effects of leadership on reform at the firm level. This survey provides additional evidence that successive leaders’ decisions about organizational strategy and structure are an important driver of variation in reform outcomes. Cross-firm analysis further suggests that the effects of leadership on reform are a matter of degree and are conditioned by existing institutions, policies, and economic factors.

This chapter examines the reception of expellees in West Germany. I show that expellees were perceived as foreigners, despite sharing ethnicity and language with the locals. I then document expellees’ exclusion from local voluntary associations and the formation of new associations based on migration status and region of origin. I conclude by analyzing contributions to public goods provision in Bavarian municipalities. I show that the more expellees a given community received, the lower the rates at which it taxed the locals’ property and business.

The adoption of inflation targets in the U.K, with the Monetary Policy Committee given instrument independence in 1997, is often presented as the answer to the assignment problem: the MPC was made responsible for the single objective of price stability, to be attained via its deployment of its single instrument, the policy rate. This chapter uses this perspective to examine the evolution of the workings of monetary policy and the MPC over its first twenty-five years, how the Bank and the MPC, came across additional possible objectives and searched for additional possible instruments. implying the need for some recasting of the role of the MPC and the way in which it operates.

This chapter explores the changing imaginaries of technological governance in the European Union (EU), on the basis of one increasingly significant element of the EU policy: ecodesign. The grounds for treating ecodesign as especially significant are at least twofold. First, ecodesign presents a success story in governmental steering of technological development in the EU. Remaining for the most part on the sidelines of public discussion, ecodesign has fundamentally impacted the daily life of all Europeans, making a very broad swathe of everyday products (vacuum cleaners, lamps, or washing machines) more energy efficient and longer lasting. Second, the expansion and deepening of ecodesign framework creates important background conditions for shaping technological futures. It sets the grounds for the conversation on how technology relates to a sustainable economy; what kind of technological advances are necessary; the desirable relation between production, distribution, and consumption; and finally, the distributive consequences of both technological and legal interventions. These questions will become ever more salient as the EU pursues sustainable futures, from the digital economy to the energy transition, from a more balanced transportation mix to sustainable food provision.

I introduce the topic, theme, central argument of the study, and its setting in Gulf petro-monarchies. I discuss the relevant scholarly literature, especially as it concerns ways in which religion (and specifically, Islam) has been used by political actors to advance particular interests. I provide a detailed elaboration of the argument and its various parts, as well as the method of analysis and justification for the choice of cases. I then discuss the context and cases in greater detail, with attention to key features of the historical development of the petro-monarchies from their pre-oil contact with the British imperial power, the arrival of oil companies, the importation of labor, the definition of borders and emergence of “modern” states. I illustrate noteworthy structural peculiarities of each of the four states. Finally, I outline the architecture of the manuscript, with an overview of each chapter.