Abstract
This chapter contextualizes the research problem with a state of the art of the literature on the institutional resource curse and resource nationalism. The central argument of the institutional theory of the resource curse is that a country should strengthen the public institutional system in the sense of increasing public accountability and enforcing checks and balances, so that they could prevent the political downsizes caused by external shocks of commodities prices. We contend that governments from Latin American countries that engaged in the resource nationalist turn during the past decades were actually headed in the opposite direction, which causes oil policies to hinder public accountability. This chapter proceeds with the explanation of the general aims of our research, the literature review on the resource curse thesis and a brief outlook of the methods employed.
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Notes
- 1.
Vertical accountability refers to electoral mechanisms of control by citizenship over the state, while horizontal accountability refers to the classic separation of the executive, the legislative and the judicial powers, while (O’Donnell 1999, 38). Social accountability is a vertical but non-electoral form of pressure to have civil servants and elected representatives justify and inform on their decisions, and possibly be sanctioned when acting in a wrong or illegal way (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2002).
- 2.
The resource governance index is based on four indicators measuring institutional and legal setting, reporting practices, safeguards and quality controls, and enabling environment.
- 3.
Policy paradigms have been used to describe major changes in European economic policies (Campbell 1998; Hodson and Mabbett 2009) and the effects of neoliberalism brought out by the “Washington Consensus” in Latin America (Babb 2013). They have also been tested on a great deal of sectorial policies, including the French cultural policy (Surel 1997), the forest policy in Northwestern USA (Cashore and Howlett 2007) and the energetic transition towards renewable sources (Kern and Kuzemko 2014). They are referred to by scholars wondering if the 2008 sub-primes crisis in the US and the 2011 crisis in weak UE economies like Greece, Italy and Spain are signs of a new “paradigm shift” coming out, from neoliberalism to “post-neoliberalism” (sic) (Hall 2013; Béland and Cox 2013; Blyth 2013; Berman 2013; Daigneault 2014).
- 4.
A third-order change refers to change in normative aims which act as a trigger for major changes in the general definition of means, such as constitutional and institutional systems reforms. A second-order change refers to strategic aims according to which policy design is made through an instrument mix. A first-order change refers to operational aims guiding these instruments calibration at an early stage of policy implementation and following a learning process.
- 5.
- 6.
On process-tracing tests, see (Beach and Pedersen 2013; Bennett 2010; Collier 2011). A hoop test is used in process-tracing to prove insufficient but necessary causal hypothesis. When passing the test, the hypothesis is relevant but it cannot be confirmed; when failing it, it can be eliminated (Bennett 2010, 210).
- 7.
In Mill’s words: “If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance save one in common, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or cause, or a necessary part of the cause, of the phenomenon” (Mill 1843, 455–456).
- 8.
In Mill’s words: “If two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree, is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon” (Mill 1843, 453).
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Fontaine, G., Medrano Caviedes, C., Narváez, I. (2020). Public Accountability Deficits as a Policy Problem. In: The Politics of Public Accountability. International Series on Public Policy . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28995-9_1
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