Ph.D. Job Candidates
Dissertation Title
"Times of Democratic Revolution: Historical Teleology and Political Freedom in Kant, Tocqueville, and Arendt."
From Enlightenment narratives of world-historical progress to more recent attempts by the Bush regime to cast the Iraq invasion as a moment in the historical unfolding of a universal telos of liberal democracy, political theory and practice has often sought to make sense of the struggle for democracy in the temporal register of progressive, teleological history. Despite devastating criticisms of the illiberal implications of such historical perspectives that have emerged from across the spectrum of contemporary democratic theories, the identification of modern history with the inevitable spread of democracy across space and time persists as a powerful political discourse; in particular, this discourse has often been invoked to account for the phenomena of modern struggles for democracy as moments within a single, and ongoing, historical process leading toward democratic universality. My dissertation project investigates this persistence, interrogating the tensions and entanglements that mark the conceptual relationship between democratic struggles and teleological narratives of history in modern political thought. Via a series of engagements with the works of Immanuel Kant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Hannah Arendt, I propose that the idea of a democratic telos governing history may not be antithetical to the liberal idea of freedom as a form of sovereign autonomy, as many critics argue, but may actually operate as its disavowed supplement.
Dissertation Committee
Linda Zerilli (Chair), Bonnie Honig, Sara Monoson
Toby Bolsen
Dissertation Title
"Private Behaviors for the Public Good: Citizens'Actions and U.S. Energy Consumption."
Why and when do individuals take political actions? Why do some, but not all, citizens make sacrifices for the sake of the public good? Outside of work on participation, political scientists have paid little attention to these questions. I seek to fill this gap by exploring the factors that drive political behaviors. I focus specifically on an important class of behaviors: actions regarding the consumption of energy. I begin by developing a theory that brings together the potentially interactive effects of individual and environmental factors that shape individuals’ decisions to take action. I test predictions generated by my theory in three empirical chapters: a media content analysis, laboratory experiment, and field experiment. The content analysis allows me to assess frames in a communication toward energy consumption, which I examine later in terms of effects. I use the theory and experiments to evaluate the impact of competing forces on attitudes toward energy conservation, willingness to pay for energy saving devices, and actual behavior (e.g., a purchasing decision and financial contribution). My results suggest a primacy of norms, which is fascinating because the impact of norms is under-studied relative to research evaluating the impact of political communications.
Dissertation Committee
James N. Druckman (Chair), Dennis Chong, and Fay Loax Cook
Laura Ephraim
Dissertation Title
"Towards a Democratic Theory of Science."
Dissertation Committee
Linda Zerilli (Chair), Bonnie Honig, James Farr
Diego Finchelstein
Dissertation Title
"Stragegy and Institutions in the International Expansion of Latin American Firms: A Comparative Analysis of the Internationalization Process in Argentina, Brazil and Chile."
Dissertation Committee
Ben Schneider (Chair), Jim Mahoney, Victor Shih and Susan Perkins (Kellogg).
Patrick Johnston
Dissertation Title
"The Treatment of Civilians in Effective Counterinsurgency Operations"
Is inflicting civilian casualties counterproductive to effective counterinsurgency operations? Most political scientists and military theorists have converged on the view that effective counterinsurgency requires providing for the welfare and earning the trust of threatened civilians. Drawing on a new database of 168 counterinsurgency campaigns fought between 1800 and 1999, and with case studies of the US-Philippine War (1899-1902), the Vietnam War (1959-75) and the Darfur conflict (since 2002), this dissertation challenges this prevailing view and investigates the effect of civilian casualties empirically and analytically. The data yield unexpected findings. First, inflicting civilian casualties is not inherently counterproductive. Evidence strongly suggests that killing civilians can significantly increase governments’ chances of defeating insurgencies. Second, however, killing civilians has diminishing military returns: incumbent who killed massive numbers of civilians were much less likely to defeat insurgencies than incumbents who inflicted lower levels of civilian casualties. The alternative theory in this work explains why (1) targeting civilians in a “strategy of coercion” can be effective, and (2), killing massive numbers of civilians in a “strategy of annihilation” is not. Taken together, quantitative and qualitative evidence challenges the dominant view that killing civilians is necessarily counterproductive, as well as the less common view that annihilating an insurgency’s entire potential support base is effective.
Dissertation Committee
Will Reno (Chair), Hendrik Spruyt, James Mahoney
Demetra Kasimis
Dissertation Title
"Drawing the Boundaries of Democracy: Immigrants, Citizens, and the Polis in Ancient Greek Contexts."
The study of classical democratic citizenship has been dominated by two approaches. One sees the Athenian citizen in terms of his juridical privileges; the other, within a series of stable binary oppositions: citizen-slave, male-female, native-barbarian, elite-mass. This dissertation troubles these categorizations by arguing that the fraught, neglected category of standing of the city’s foreign residents, a third of Athens’ population, illuminates that citizenship was a way of life whose contours were in fact shifting. These free, non-citizen men and women called “metics” were not the antithesis of citizens. They were economically diverse, integrated, but disenfranchised. This study argues that ancient critics used figurations of metics to ruminate membership, explore democracy's limits, and imagine its alternatives.
https://sites.google.com/site/demetrakasimis/
Dissertation Committee
Sara Monoson, Bonnie Honig, Mary Dietz, Richard Kraut
Kendra Koivu
Dissertation Title
"Institutions, Property, and the Evolution of Organized Crime. "
Dissertation Committee
Will Reno (Chair), Jim Mahoney, Kathy Thelen
Natacha Lemasle
Dissertation Title
"Why do Combatants Disarm?"
Disarmament after conflicts is commonly thought of as a task for states, or if states are too weak, for the international community. This study challenges this assumption and finds instead that local authority structures play decisive roles in shaping processes of disarmament. Based on field research in Sierra Leone and Liberia, Lemasle finds that some communities engage in “auto-disarmament”, often with little reference to official policies. This study uncovers the roles that patronage networks and the organization of wartime armed groups plays in this process. It challenges the notion that the end of conflict marks a return to a status quo ante, and instead traces through the processes of local disarmament how wartime organizations transition into post-conflict politics and economies.
Dissertation Committee
Will Reno (Chair), Samy Cohen (Co-Chair)
Juan Olmeda
Dissertation Title
"Presidents, Governors and policy reforms: Post-decentralization patterns of intergovernmental interactions in Latin America. "
Dissertation Committee
Edward Gibson (Chair), Ben Schneider, Andrew Roberts
Laura Reagan
Dissertation Committee
Sara Monoson (Chair), Jim Farr, Lars Toender
Kim Sims
Dissertation Title
"Judges vs. Borders: Transnational Judicial Networks and Judicial Identity Transformations in Western Europe."
Dissertation Committee
Michael Loriaux (Chair), Karen Alter, Will Reno
David Steinberg
Dissertation Title
"The Politics of Exchange Rate Valuation in Developing Countries."
This dissertation develops a theory of domestic political coalitions to explain why some developing countries adopt weak and “undervalued” exchange rates while most others maintain “overvalued” exchange rates. I argue that a variety of different sectors benefit from policy packages that include overvalued exchange rates. Nontradable industries, such as banking and construction, favor overvaluation because this improves their purchasing power. Although conventional wisdom suggests that exporters and import-competing industries oppose overvalued exchange rates, I posit that these groups often support overvaluation because they derive large gains from the compensatory policies—such as fiscal subsidies and currency pegs—that politicians frequently package with currency overvaluation. Politicians adopt overvalued exchange rates because this allows them to build a broad political coalition. The theory predicts that currencies are only likely to be undervalued when political power is highly concentrated in the hands of a small group of exporters. To test the theory, I adopt a multi-method research design that combines analysis of time-series—cross-sectional data with detailed case-studies. The dissertation includes in-depth analyses of two key cases, exchange rate overvaluation in Argentina and China’s policy of undervaluation, which are based on interviews and archival research in each country. I briefly extend the analysis to several other countries in the concluding chapter.
Dissertation Committee
Hendrik Spruyt (Chair), Ben Ross Schneider, Victor Shih, Anne Sartori
Julieta Suarez
Dissertation Title
"How Democratic Institutions Spread over Territory: Exploring the Myth of Nationalized Politics."
Dissertation Committee
Edward Gibson (Chair), Jason Seawright, Andrew Roberts
Christopher Swarat
Dissertation Title
"World Politics through the Looking Glass: Confucius and the Re-imagining of International Relations."
This dissertation provides a critique of contemporary International Relations (IR) discourse through the “recovery” of an ancient Chinese, specifically Confucian, vocabulary and worldview. Contemporary IR discourse, it will be argued in these pages, has become less and less appropriate to the post-Cold War, post-hegemonic world. Though a "Confucian-centered" IR is by no means an answer to present-day quandaries, by approaching contemporary "common sense" through this alternative lens, we are granted the opportunity to relativize our common sense vocabulary and construct new concepts, potentially more suggestive, more reflective of world political trends.
Dissertation Committee
Hendrik Spruyt, Michael Loriaux, Ian Hurd, Victor Shih
Salvador Vazquez
Dissertation Title
"Institutional Bravado: How Politicians Gain Popularity at the Expense of the Legitimacy of Institutions. "
Due to past experiences of electoral fraud, countries of recent democratization face low confidence in electoral institutions. This project puts forth the hypothesis that runner-up candidates, in the pursuit of popularity, have incentives to accuse winners of orchestrating an electoral fraud regardless of fraud having happened, further reducing the credibility of electoral institutions. Through content analysis, this project assesses the features of pre- and post-electoral discourse about electoral institutions in Mexico from the controversial presidential election of 1988 through the again controversial election in 2006, and using survey-based experiments it explores the effect of said discourse on the popularity of the accusers, and on the credibility of electoral institutions.
Dissertation Committee
Edward Gibson (Chair), Jamie Druckman, Jason Seawright,
Kai Zeng
Dissertation Title
"Foreign Direct Investment Liberalization and the Political Economy of Authoritarianism."
With few domestic checks and balances, the accountability of authoritarian regimes is always in question. This commitment problem between the ruling elite and the citizens leads to various issues including economic stagnation and political unrest. In the dissertation, I develop a series of static and stochastic dynamic game-theoretic models of economic openness to foreign direct investment (FDI), social unrest and political instability in autocracies. I analyze the short-run and long-run effects of FDI liberalization on the stability of authoritarian regimes and explain how the political and economic endowments determine the timing and magnitude of FDI reform in autocracies and how international financial crisis affects the prospect of democratization in open authoritarian regimes. Some of the theoretical models are tested on a data set of 157 countries from 1980 to 2006, using a variety of panel data techniques. The others are tested using comparative historical case studies.
Committee: David Austen-Smith (Chair), Anne Sartori, Victor Shih
Web site: http://depot.northwestern.edu/~kze870/
Dissertation Committee
David Austen-Smith (Chair), Anne Satori, Victor Shih
Luke Qi Zhang
Dissertation Title
"Communist Revolution and the Political Origin of the Private Economy in China: Evidence from Zhejiang Province."
This research explores the political factors that determined the spatial variations of the private economic development of Zhejiang province in China after 1949. Systematic research shows that the origin of the variations of private sectoral development in the province can be traced back to the revolutionary legacies prior to 1949. My hypothesis is that if prior to 1949 the guerrilla force was strong in a particular locality (here we are referring to a county), then after 1949 the local elites had more incentives and capabilities to protect and promote private economy than they would have had otherwise in the Maoist and reform eras. The theoretical framework developed here can be effectively applied to other provinces in China, revealing similar patterns of the interplay between local cadres and private entrepreneurs.
Web site: http://zhang.qi2004.googlepages.com/qizhang
Dissertation Committee
Victor Shih (Chair), Will Reno, James Mahoney