The political economy of external exploitation. A comparative investigation of China's foreign relations

On the basis of the selectorate theory, this article examines the link between distributional policies, autocratic cooperation, and its potential for autocratic stability. It compares to what extent Cambodia, Myanmar, and Mongolia complied with China's key external interests in the period 1990-2010. Against this background, the article examines the cooperation between winning coalitions in these countries and China and thereby links a political economy argument to the discussion on regime type and regime stability in autocracy research. The article finds that autocratic exploitation is beneficial to authoritarian powers, such as China, but that hybrid regimes rather than closed autocracies are most vulnerable to such exploitation.