working papers

My dissertation speaks to two different broader research agendas.

1. Long-run impacts of revolutionary mobilization

The first focuses on the effects of mobilization in revolutionary conflicts for long-run post-revolutionary inequalities, networks, and identities. I theorize and test for “bottom-up” processes of state formation rooted in mobilization. I also focus on the family as an important conduit for intergenerational transfers of benefits and networks centered on the nation-state.

The pull of the center: the mobilizational roots of transformation in social revolution Under review.

Abstract:

I study how marginalized people have become integrated into networks centered on the state through revolutionary mobilization. Using a unique genealogical dataset from Laos, I test for the intergenerational, biographical effects of wartime mobilization into a revolutionary political party. In Laos, revolutionary mobilization in the 1960s pulled in individuals from peripheries into political organizations. Results show that descendants of such people were then over twice as likely to work for the party-state than people from similar, unmobilized families. Descendants were over five times as likely to have a cross-ethnic marriage and more than eight times as likely to attain a college diploma, among other social shifts. Mobilization conferred abilities and created opportunities for social advancement, leading to self-sustaining political and economic benefits, which have been transmitted within reconstituted families. The nature of revolutionary mobilization itself is an important, neglected, factor in post-revolutionary social transformation and class formation in revolutionary autocracies.

2. Authoritarian coalitions, dynamic incentives, and institutions

A second research agenda involves the formal modeling and empirical study of dynamic incentives in authoritarian coalitions. In another paper from my dissertation, I argue that institutional change during the third wave of democratization can be more parsimoniously understood by accounting for the impact of economic shocks on authoritarian coalitions. I study authoritarian institutions in the historical context of the 1970s and 1980s, when they steadily emerged across the world in a range of country contexts.

Sovereign debt, democratization, and authoritarian institutions in the third wave (draft available on request)

Abstract

I offer a reevaluation of the history of authoritarian institutionalization, which centers the global economic shocks of the 1970s rather than the end of the Cold War. I find that institutionalization occurred after debt buildups. Debt buildups, in turn, happened as developing countries used favorable commodity shocks to jump-start attempts at economic growth and transformation. In addition to cooptation and credible commitments, I argue that institutionalization helped solve principal-agent problems in the process of debt-fueled growth by allowing for limited areas of political and economic competition; functions related to cooptation and credible commitments also widened the scope of politically feasible competition. I also find that debt flows to institutionalized regimes were less sensitive to subsequent negative economic shocks than flows to uninstitutionalized regimes, suggesting that lenders responded favorably to institutionalization.