Economic elites are at the epicenter of political economy explanations of distributive struggles that lead to significant political and economic changes—from enfranchisement and state-building to the direction of redistributive and trade policies. Whereas some of these works consider the economic elite as a cohesive actor that advances a unified policy agenda, others assume its members are segmented by the characteristics of the unique asset they hold. Protecting Capital begins with the observation that, since early modern times, the most powerful members of the economic elite own assets in multiple sectors simultaneously and hence cannot be divided between landed and industrial, according to a specific sector or industry, or the specificity of their assets. Consequently, it maintains that by neglecting the diversification structure of the asset portfolios of the members of the economic elite, current theories define their interests incompletely and, thus, cannot fully explain how they interact with state actors to advance those interests, the extent of their capacity to influence distributive outcomes and, more generally, how distributive conflicts develop in contexts where diversified elites are predominant. These are precisely the matters addressed in Protecting Capital—why, how, and to what extent the nature of economic elites shape distributive outcomes.
Examining the long history of elites in Argentina and Chile since their transition into modern economies, this work sheds light on the historical micro-foundations of elites’ capacity to influence distributive outcomes with a provocative finding: that there is an unexplored cleavage within the economic elite, the one between diversified and specialized elites, and that the predominance of the former type over the latter can help improve the provision of public goods for large sectors of the population, albeit at the expense of augmenting inequality in representative institutions.
Protecting Capital: Economic Elites, Asset Portfolio Diversification, and the Politics of Distribution has received the 2019 Mancur Olson Award for best dissertation in political economy completed in the previous two years given by the American Political Science Association. The award committee emphasized the author’s ``creativity as well as significant shoe-leather” to ``engage a question of broad and enduring interest for political science, namely the role of economic elites in determining redistributive outcomes. It is the kind of dissertation that obliges scholars to revisit conventional wisdom. And it does so, in part, by showing that the field can learn from shifting its focus to the non-Western world.“
Examining the long history of elites in Argentina and Chile since their transition into modern economies, this work sheds light on the historical micro-foundations of elites’ capacity to influence distributive outcomes with a provocative finding: that there is an unexplored cleavage within the economic elite, the one between diversified and specialized elites, and that the predominance of the former type over the latter can help improve the provision of public goods for large sectors of the population, albeit at the expense of augmenting inequality in representative institutions.
Protecting Capital: Economic Elites, Asset Portfolio Diversification, and the Politics of Distribution has received the 2019 Mancur Olson Award for best dissertation in political economy completed in the previous two years given by the American Political Science Association. The award committee emphasized the author’s ``creativity as well as significant shoe-leather” to ``engage a question of broad and enduring interest for political science, namely the role of economic elites in determining redistributive outcomes. It is the kind of dissertation that obliges scholars to revisit conventional wisdom. And it does so, in part, by showing that the field can learn from shifting its focus to the non-Western world.“