Undergraduate research on Liberia. Presentation followed by remarks and discussion. This video can be downloaded, but we refer you to the YouTube version for online streaming: https://youtu.be/OWNCehsxBeA
In May 1991 the allied armies of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the 27-year military regime (Dergue) in Ethiopia. During the succeeding 27 years, the EPRDF-dominated government attracted one of the highest per capita levels of external aid in the...
Nature and Civilization is a focused interpretation of Kant’s politics insofar as it bears on the distinction between nature and civilization. It seeks to answer the question, How is Kant’s distinction between nature and civilization informing his global political thought? Kant thinks that in moving from the state of nature...
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is much more politically powerful than we might expect it to be. Despite both shockingly high rates of gun violence and deep, durable public support for stricter rules on gun ownership, the NRA regularly defeats or weakens the content of gun control legislation. Its influence...
Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their state’s identity, status, or history, has not been properly acknowledged and respected in the conduct of diplomacy. Among international relations scholars, these instances are usually ascribed to the fact that states, like individuals, need...
What explains the difference in the timing of female enfranchisement in Latin America? Despite constituting an essential process of inclusion for democratization, no comparative analysis of the region has sought to explain the differences observed in the timing of reform. Common explanations – developed for other regions – concerning the...
A functional democratic society rests on the premise that the mass public holds clear preferences for policies, candidates, and more. To arrive at these preferences, many citizens rely on their social identities, making political decisions based on what they see as benefitting the groups to which they belong. They may...
Abstract The relationship between truth and politics is an ancient and venerable problem in political philosophy. But just as the traditional subordination of politics to philosophy has obscured central categories and experiences of politics (like action and freedom), it has also obscured the distinctive problem of truth in politics, or...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
My dissertation examines group dynamics of minority populations during times of violent conflict. By applying a comparative analysis to case studies drawn from the conflicts in Lebanon and Syria, I shed light on how and why minority groups decide to join a conflict, stay on the sidelines, go it alone,...
In the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, I find that Aristotle endorses two distinct forms of political activity. The first form, which I term statesman activity, is intrinsically valuable. Aristotle thinks that we should value this kind of political activity because it is constitutive of human well-being. The second form, which...
The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (or “GRH”), which unprecedentedly provided for “sequestration”, a doomsday device to enforce fiscal discipline upon Congress and the President, was passed with bipartisan support on December 12, 1985. How did GRH take place, and why did it assume its final form? Casting GRH’s enactment in functionalist and...
ABSTRACT Variation of stateness across the territory and population of sovereign states is a notorious, but understudied phenomenon with important implications for issues such as global security, environmental sustainability, and political stability. This dissertation engages in theory-building research to explain subnational variation of stateness in the contemporary world, focusing on...
This dissertation is a broad study on individual and firm-level financial conditions and their effects on politics. In the first chapter, I study the effect of economic conditions on political polarization using micro-data on house prices, mortgages, and individual political contributions. I argue that shocks to housing wealth --- the...
Thinkers attempting to challenge existing conceptions of political life often find that they encounter limitations in dominant modes of spectatorship and communication. If popular audiences are unsuitably oriented toward the presentation of certain content, this introduces a fundamental obstacle for political theoretic efforts to shape ideas and interactions. This dissertation...
This dissertation explains the heterogeneous effects of armed conflict on sub-national governance in the North Caucasus. While acknowledging the role of inherited institutions, my multimethod investigation shows how they were strategically transformed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, creating unintended consequences and the basis for governance today. My main...
This dissertation is composed of three articles that focus on the electoral support coalitions of populist parties in Latin America. Using typologies, comparative-historical analysis, and experimental methods, the articles conceptualize and explain variation across several dimensions of these coalitions: their size and scope, their level of organization, and the identities...
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2)...
Clientelism has been largely defined as an electoral strategy in which politicians distribute resources to voters to gather their support. This study proposes a new framework to understand clientelism by inverting the perspective of this practice, focusing on voters rather than politicians. This study proposes that clientelism should be understood...
The social groups to which individuals belong, as well as the identities that result from these group memberships, exert powerful influences on their political attitudes. Additionally, political elites offer cues that shape these same preferences—often by targeting and interacting with identities. However, there remain underexplored pathways by which elites can...