What We Talk About When We Talk About Foreign Direct Investment

This paper argues that the foreign direct investment ( FDI ) data commonly used to test political science theories about FDI often diverge from the theorized about phenomena in ways that can introduce bias and complicate hypothesis testing. I describe some of the key conceptual issues surrounding the quantification of FDI , how commonly used data deals with these issues, and the extent to which those coding rules allow or prevent these data from speaking to political science theories. I show that the empirical relationship between democracy, political risk, and multinational corporations behavior is significantly impacted by “getting the measure right.” I conclude by arguing that political science theories about FDI speak to such a wide variety of empirically and conceptually distinct phenomena that conflating them as “ FDI ” does a disservice to the complexity of the topic.