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Daniel Berger

Research Fields:

Comparative Politics
IPE

Dissertation Title:"Local institutional legacies in West Africa: A micro-level investigation of how colonial era decisions affect local governance today"

Dissertation Committee: Shanker Satyanath (co-chair), David Stasavage (co-chair), Adam Przeworski, and Leonard Wantchekon

Short Description: My dissertation investigates how local governmental institutions affect governance outcomes and why local institutions persist, with a focus on within-country variance in both Nigeria and Ghana. A large cross-national literature has recently demonstrated the importance of institutions for economic growth. By looking rigorously at local institutions I provide well identified estimates of the effects of a specific institution on governance outcomes of interest to political scientists instead of on purely economic outcomes. Further, by showing unambiguous within-country institutional effects my dissertation explores how much between country variance may be due to systematic differences in local institutions.

I use natural experiments in Nigeria and Ghana to examine the effects of local governmental institutions. In both cases a colonial power (The British in Nigeria and the Asante in Ghana) implemented different local institutions in various parts of the present day country. In both of these cases the choice of institutions was unrelated to the situation at the border between the different colonial institutions. In both cases I find better local governments in the places where the colonial power, for purely extractive purposes, built more advanced tax collection bureaucracy. The quality differences appear to persist through differences in local bureaucratic capacity. Importantly, it almost definitely does not persist through a difference in tax/service level equilibria.

Establishing the internal validity of the natural experiment required carefully examining the historical literature, including contemporaneous accounts and British colonial office papers. I show that there is no difference between the treated and control areas other than the institutions they were assigned. I also explore the external validity of the natural experiments both by looking at two very different examples (Nigeria and Ghana) and large-n cross-country variation local institutions and governance in sub-Saharan Africa.

Writing Sample

Vitae

Anjali Thomas Bohlken

Research Fields:

Comparative Politics
Political Economy

Dissertation Title: "The Paradox of Decentralization: Internal Party Organization and the Political Logic of Decentralization in India"

Dissertation Committee: Kanchan Chandra (co-chair), David Stasavage (co-chair), Neal Beck and Adam Przeworski

Short Description: Policy-makers often advocate decentralization as a means of improving governance and reducing poverty in the developing world.But why would government elites voluntarily choose to create and empower elected governments at the local level? The dissertation seeks to address this puzzle by exploiting variation within India in the extent to which state governments decentralized power to local governments. Through a combination of game-theoretic modeling and qualitative research based on case studies and field interviews, I develop the argument that government elites have an incentive to decentralize when they lose control of their party's network of local activists on whom they rely to gain votes. Through decentralization,government leaders are able to bypass the party organization by empowering elected local representatives who deliver them votes in return.

To test the theoretical predictions linking internal party organization and decentralization, I develop new measures of two key aspects of internal party organization which I refer to as `divided control' and 'consolidated party leadership' and collect data on these measures for 17 Indian states between 1970 and 2005 using party archives and other sources. The analysis based on these data, combined with original data on political decentralization, supports the hypothesis that government elites have an incentive to decentralize when they lose control of their party's organizational network. Multiple methods are used to develop and test the argument including game-theoretic modeling, field interviews with politicians, party officials and bureaucrats, case studies of individual states and a variety of statistical techniques including a quasi-experiment based on a regression discontinuity design.Implications of the argument for the political and economic consequences of decentralization are also examined through the use of political and economic data at the village and household level. The findings suggest the paradox that, rather than empowering ordinary citizens, decentralization tends to increase elite control over local politics. From a policy perspective, the results contain an important lesson for those who advocate decentralization as a means of increasing local independence or as a way to strengthen democracy.

Other Research:

1)“Coups,Elections and the Predatory State”: Uses a formal model which compares the differences in incentives for incumbents to reduce rent extraction when they face a threat of being overthrown as opposed to when they face competitive elections. Forthcoming in the Journal of Theoretical Politics.

2)“Ethnic Violence and Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation of Hindu-Muslim Riots in India” (with Ernest Sergenti). Uses instrumental variables to examine the role of economic conditions in explaining inter-ethnic violence. Forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research.

3)"Could ‘People’s Empowerment’ have Political Advantages?: Using Regression Discontinuity Design to Assess the Political Benefits of Decentralization in India''. In Progress. Poster presented at the 2009 Annual Conference of the Society for Political Methodology, New Haven,CT.

Carolina Curvale

Research Fields:

Political Economy
Comparative Politics
Latin American Politics

Dissertation Title: “Does political participation affect political stability? A study of Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Dissertation Committee: Adam Przeworski (chair), Russell Hardin, Leonard Wantchekon

Vitae

Writing Sample:

Carolina Curvale (coauthored with Adam Przeworski). 2007. “Instituciones políticas y desarrollo económico en las Américas: el largo plazo.” En Visiones sobre el Desarrollo en América Latina, CIDOB/CEPAL.
Adam Przeworski with Carolina Curvale. 2008. “Does Politics Explain the Economic Gap Between the United States and Latin America?” In Francis Fukuyama (ed.), Falling Behind: Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States, New York: Oxford University Press. Spanish version: “¿Explica la política la brecha económica entre Estados Unidos y América Latina?,” en Francis Fukuyama (ed.), La brecha entre América Latina y Estados Unidos. Determinantes políticos e institucionales del desarrollo económico, Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006.
Dissertation chapter: Theoretical Perspectives

Maria Constantinescu

Research Fields:

Political Theory and Legal Philosophy (emphasis on the Enlightenment)
U.S. Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties
Intellectual History of the Italian Renaissance

Dissertation Title: Rights, liberty, and equality in David Hume's Political Thought

Dissertation Committee: Professor Russell Hardin (chair), Professor Philip Hamburger (co-chair), professor Euan Cameron

Carolina Curvale

Research Fields:

Political Economy
Comparative Politics
Latin American Politics

Alejandro Quiroz Flores

Research Fields:

International Relations
Methodology

Dissertation Title: "The Ministerial Condition: Political Survival and Cabinet Reshuffles."

Dissertation Committee: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (co-chair), Nathaniel Beck, and Alastair Smith (co-chair).

Vitae

I am a specialist in international relations, particularly international security and its link to domestic politics. While focusing on the relationship between interstate war and political survival, my investigations also span across classical international relations topics such as military expenditures and alliances. I also maintain a strong research agenda in political methodology that concentrates on the development of new models of interdependent survival processes.

Writing Sample:

"An Empirical Examination of War Termination and Leader Change"

Gökçe Göktepe

Research Fields:

Political Economy
Comparative Politics
Political Methodology (minor)

Dissertation Title: "Democratic Transitions and Implicit Power: An Econometric Approach"

Dissertation Committee: Shanker Satyanath (Chair), David Stasavage, Leonard Wantchekon

Short Description: My dissertation proposes a novel quantitative approach to distinguish between explicit and implicit democratic transitions whose importance has been increasingly emphasized in the transitions literature.

The proposed method uses daily stock market data and exploits exogenous shocks (health shocks to the incumbent, commodity price shocks or assassinations) to each individual politico-economic system studied. In addition to financial data, the second major component to the analysis is the construction of a country specific connections data set (each firm is identified as connected to the military, state, incumbent or the opposition) that relies on an extensive reading of historical and current secondary literature and news search for the country under analysis.

The dissertation argues that the proposed new methodology fills a significant gap left by standard measures of democracy widely used in the political science literature that fail to take into account the potential implicit influence of the elements of the previous dictatorial regime on the economic sphere of the country-a point that has already been brought into attention by several prominent scholars of democracy.

Vitae:

Writing Sample:
Democratic Transitions and Implicit Power: An Econometric Approach. Co-Authored with Shanker Satyanath, currently R&R at QJPS

Claudia Halbac

Research Fields:

Political Economy
Comparative Politics

Dissertation Overview: "Democracy and the Protection of Private Property."

Dissertation Committee: Adam Przeworski (Chair), Stephen Holmes, Russel Hardin

Short Description: Combining a theoretical and empirical approach, I analyze the concept of threats to property by the state and the incentives democratic institutions have to protect property. While similar work uses taxation as proxy for threats to property, I focus on expropriation/nationalization. The normative and political differences between the two policies inspire the main theoretical contribution of the work, namely delineating the three major indicators of the failure of political institutions to protect property: lack of compensation, presence of disproportionate impact and degree of violation, specifically, absence of choice. Empirically, I analyze foreign direct investment expropriation data to ascertain any causal impact of regime types. While descriptive statistics show that democracies and dictatorships differ in the types of expropriation mechanisms employed and the economic sectors targeted, there is no difference in the frequency of FDI expropriation. OLS regression further indicates that democracies are more likely to employ FDI expropriations to respond to labor pressures and ease of running the firms, whereas dictatorships take into consideration only the ease of running the nationalized firm. For domestic expropriations, the case study of Chile under Allende illustrates one dynamic between various government branches in dealing with expropriations that qualify as threats to property.

Vitae

Writing Sample: "Relationship between Taxes and Expropriation."

Yingying Na

Research Fields:

Political Economy
Comparative Politics

Dissertation Title: Local Election in Dictatorships

Committee: Adam Przeworski (Chair), Eric Dickson, Leonard Wantchekon

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Comparative Politics

International Relations

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Political Economy

Quantitative Methods