The Resource-Bust Stability Paradox: Informal Networks, Market Sentiment, and Ideational Settlements in Petrostates

Kazakhstan’s post-2014 stability (Groce 2020) challenges resource-curse expectations that busts destabilize rentier regimes. This project proposes a multi-layered explanation. First, map informal elite networks in the energy sector to capture “substitution capacity” under fiscal stress—how private ownership and patronage webs reallocate rents to maintain coalitions. Second, use financial microstructure and sentiment analytics, inspired by Saleemi (2023), to track market expectations and rumor-driven shifts that proxy perceived regime risk in real time. Third, incorporate a “cultural political economy” lens (Cummings 2024) to measure ideational narratives—status, nation-building, sacrifice—that legitimize austerity and reframe distributional cuts. We would assemble a panel of petrostates across boom-bust cycles, join to regime event data (Bjørnskov and Rode 2018/2020 on coups/institutions; ERT on transformations), and test whether (a) denser, more redundant informal networks, (b) quiescent or supportive market-sentiment trajectories during busts, and (c) cohesive legitimacy narratives predict stability net of macro shocks. The novelty is connecting ideational settlements and real-time market signals to the survival function of resource regimes—showing why private ownership per se (as theory often assumes) doesn’t necessarily liberalize patron–client relations or destabilize regimes, and under which configurations busts fail to trigger transformation.

References:

1. Circling the barrels: Kazakhstan’s regime stability in the wake of the 2014 oil bust. Morena Skalamera Groce (2020).
2. Regime Change Operation in Pakistan: Examining Yield as a Behavioral Pattern of Microblogging rumors during the Political-Obsessed Period. Jawad Saleemi (2023). Economic Analysis Letters.
3. Understanding power, culture and institutional change: a revised approach to political settlements analysis. Clare Cummings (2024). New Political Economy.
4. Regime types and regime change: A new dataset on democracy, coups, and political institutions. C. Bjørnskov, Martin Rode (2020). Revista Internacional de Organizaciones.
5. Regime types and regime change: A new dataset on democracy, coups, and political institutions. C. Bjørnskov, Martin Rode (2018). Revista Internacional de Organizaciones.