Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Hicks, Barbara

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

The stereotypical view of how authoritarian regimes operate has changed in the last few decades since the end of the 20th century. Personalist regimes have become much more common; however, not as much information exists on how they operate compared to other authoritarian regime types. Personalist regimes have seemingly gotten a biased level of investment from major authoritarian powers in the past few decades, despite arguably more significant threats of instability. This research project intends to understand whether major authoritarian powers, in this case China and Russia, have a bias for personalist regimes in allocating their foreign direct investment. A possible explanation for this potential relationship is that these regimes seek greater authoritarian foreign direct investment to stave off threats of instability and avoid governance pressures that often come with investment from democracies. This study concludes that there is unlikely to be any sort of significant bias for investment into personalist regimes. Rather, regional trends seem to be a stronger explanation of investment bias than regime type in any capacity. Follow-up research is focused on examining the regional relationship that does exist, and whether it has any links to the domination of personalist regimes within the high investment region of West Asia. Personalist regimes and their external relations also require deeper analysis due to the characteristics that make them different in daily operations compared to other authoritarian regimes.

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