Explaining public accountability deficit in extractive policies: The Ecuadorian case

This study presents a causal mechanism linking resource nationalism with public accountability deficit. The adoption of policy aims triggers an institutional drift at three levels. At a normative level, bureaucratic centralism is adopted by the government. At the strategic level a sectorial policy fostering the states control over the policy area is formulated. At an operational level, the government favors coercive conflict management to cope with protests against the extractive policy. The theoretical causal mechanism is confirmed after passing 19/20 empirical tests, which raises the posterior confidence up to 0.73 according to the Bayesian formalization. The findings show a way for institutional and policy change to tackle the resource curse, even though further research on other typical cases (such as Venezuela) and deviant cases (such as Mexico) should increase the external validity of the theory.