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
Marissa Brookes
Dissertation Title
Transnational Labor Alliances: Why Some Succeed
Dissertation Description:
Workers are increasingly cooperating across national borders in campaigns aimed at influencing employers to improve wages, working conditions, and labor rights. To date, however, there are no systematic studies of why some transnational labor alliances succeed while others do not. This dissertation thus develops a causal theory of success and failure in transnational labor alliances. I hypothesize that transnational labor alliances succeed only when they exercise a type of power that threatens the core interests and long-term strategies of the employer in question. Moreover, workers must coordinate both within their own organizations and across national borders in order to exercise power on the international scale. Using cross- and within-case methods of comparative analysis, I test this hypothesis through an examination of six recent transnational campaigns featuring alliances spearheaded by trade unions from Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These campaigns occurred in the shipping, retail, security services, and luxury hotel industries between 1995 and 2010. The data, collected through extensive fieldwork, offer evidence that intra-union coordination, inter-union coordination, and a context-appropriate power strategy are all necessary conditions for transnational labor alliances to succeed.
Dissertation Committee
Kathleen Thelen (chair), James Mahoney, Benjamin I. Page
Ross Carroll
Dissertation Title
The Enlightenment of Humor: Stoicism and Enthusiasm in Shaftesbury, Hume and Burke
Dissertation Description:
My dissertation investigates the political responses of three eighteenth century theorists to the problem of 'enthusiasm', a toxic mix of unruly imagination and passion then commonly associated with religious fanaticism. The predominant responses to enthusiasm at the time centered either on persecution or a reluctant toleration combined with programs to 'cure' the enthusiasts and prevent their fanaticism spreading contagiously. Dissatisfied with these responses, Shaftesbury sought to regulate enthusiasm in himself and others through an exemplary regimen of Stoical self-practice, a regimen that placed humor, wit, and ridicule at its center. Far from recommending Stoical withdrawal, I argue, Shaftesbury aimed at nothing less than the cultivation of a new form of citizen. Capable of steadfastly enduring the ridicule that participation in public life often invited, Shaftesbury's ideal citizen could also deploy humor to defuse the gravity that affords unwarranted security to those in authority. I examine the promise and limitations of this political project through critical comparisons with two of the eighteenth century's most infamous critics of enthusiasm: David Hume and Edmund Burke.
Dissertation Committee
Mary G. Dietz (Chair), Bonnie Honig, James Farr
Mneesha Gellman
Dissertation Title
Claiming Culture: A Comparative Study of Ethnic Minority Rights Mobilizations in Mexico, Turkey and El Salvador
Dissertation Description:
My dissertation examines why some violence-affected ethnic minorities are more successful than others in mobilizing for cultural rights. Despite many common characteristics—such as democratizing political regimes and legacies of state and paramilitary persecution—ethnic minority groups in Mexico, Turkey and El Salvador make cultural rights demands on their states in very different ways. I argue that communities that are highly mobilized around cultural rights generally exhibit lower levels of political, economic, and cultural accommodation by their states, which leads these communities to use extra-institutional rather than institutional claims. By contrast, communities that are less mobilized tend to enjoy higher degrees of state accommodation, rendering these communities more willing to accept fewer cultural rights. I find that when certain combinations of state accommodation of ethnic minorities are high, communities will be less likely to produce public narratives that catalyze their communities to mobilize.
Dissertation Committee
Edward Gibson (chair), William Reno, James Mahoney
Jael Goldsmith
Dissertation Title
Striving for Services: Citizen Strategies in Changing Economic, Political, and Welfare Regimes, Chile 1954-2010
Dissertation Description:
This project traces citizen-state interactions during three radically different economic, political, and welfare provision regimes in contemporary Chile. It centers on the way people's everyday lives and abilities to ensure services are shaped by macro-economic models -- what commodification and decommodification mean to individuals in their everyday lives, how people adapt and resist to dramatically different political, macroeconomic, and social provision systems. By situating observation smade on multiple levels; from a citizen grass-roots perspective, at the site of interactions between citizens and the state, at the changing roles of NGO's in providing and pressuring for services, as well as a revision of official policy, I will show that by focusing only on formal institutions, scholars have missed the informal on-the-groud practices that govern social welfare. This investigation sheds light on the elaborate collective, familial, and individual strategies deployed by citizens to to shape the contents of their interactions with state workers, and the ways these practices are both reproduced intergenerationally and rapidly adjusted. It speaks to the changes and continuities in people's everyday life experiences under very different economic and political regimes, challenging conceptions of citizens as the passive clients/recipients as depicted in mainstream welfare literature and imagined policy makers.
Dissertation Committee
James Mahoney, Edward Gibson, Andrew Roberts
Brian Harrison
Dissertation Title
Red Brain, Blue Brain: The impact of Partisanship & Motivated Reasoning on the President
Dissertation Description:
Reliance on partisan identity carries a potentially major liability: it predisposes citizens to a distorted view of the political world. Partisans expect their party to perform better, to produce high-quality candidates, and to take appropriate issue stands (e.g., Gerber & Huber 2010; Taber and Lodge 2006; Gerber, Huber, & Washington 2010). To preserve expectations and to protect their partisan identities, people often expose themselves to information that validates their existing partisan identities. When confronted with uncongenial information, they tend to ignore, to discount, or to counter-argue it (Taber and Lodge 2006). In the heat of partisan rhetoric and political campaigns, partisan identities become more salient, leading citizens to hold situational self-conceptions as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, and to think about politics from an “us” verses “them” perspective. When partisanship is emphasized- during times of elite polarization, for example- people engage with their partisan identity more deeply and use it to evaluate the political world around them. Using survey and original experimental data, I show that an increasingly partisan climate and competitive media environment tends to (1) prevent Presidents the ability to gain access and to impact an audience outside of like-minded partisans and ideologues; (2) increase the likelihood that individuals self-select into partisan information sources to reinforce existing partisan beliefs and (3) provide added incentives to interpret and process rhetoric that challenges existing political attitudes differently than that which supports attitudes. The implications of this finding is that the President and his rhetoric may have limited influence, only having an intensifying effect for like-minded partisans while having little or no effect on the other party. This phenomenon may have deleterious effects for the President given the frequency with which the President engages in explicitly partisan rhetoric.
Dissertation Committee
James Druckman (chair), Benjamin I. Page, Laurel Harbridge, and Daniel Galvin
Samara Klar
Personal webpage: : www.samaraklar.com
Dissertation Title
The influence of identities on political preferences and behavior
Dissertation Description
I study how individuals' identities -- the groups, roles, and associations with which they identify -- influence their political attitudes and behavior. I use experimental methods (in and outside the lab), survey analyses, and a variety of statistical tools to learn about the political consequences of our multiple and, at times, conflicting identities. My ongoing work pays particularly close attention to the significance of political identity, the consequences of diverse deliberation, and the processes by which voters with competing identities reconcile their conflicting interests in order to make a political choice.
Dissertation Committee
James Druckman (chair), Benjamin I. Page, Peter Miller
Romain Malejacq
Dissertation Title
Warlords and the State System: Power Strategies and Authority in Afghanistan 2001-2009
Dissertation Description
Although my research engages scholarship on violence and conflict, its main focus is on the nature of alternative power structures and their effect on state building processes. It is situated at the crossroads of international relations and comparative politics. My main contribution lies in exploring the intermingling of local and international sources of authority and its significance for terms of changing the structure and operation of the contemporary international system. My dissertation shows that state-builders have to engage in a process of hybridization as they attempt to construct institutions that conform to Weberian ideals. In turn, 'warlords' exercise a surprising degree of capacity to shape these processes to suit their interests. In pursuit of this topic I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan. Over numerous visits I have built a strong network of relations in Afghanistan that gave me the opportunity to interview a wide range of actors both inside and outside Afghanistan (from Vice-President and Ministers to local commanders and advisors).
Dissertaton Committee
Will Reno (Chair), Hendrik Spruyt, Bertrand Badie
Jackie McAllister
Personal webpage: http://www.jacquelinemcallister.com
Dissertation Title
On Knife’s Edge: International Criminal Tribunals’ Impact on Civilian Violence in Ongoing Conflicts
Dissertation Description
Over the past two decades, international criminal tribunals (ICTs) have emerged as new players in some of the world’s most violent conflicts. And yet, little is known about how they actually affect hostilities. I investigate the conditions under which ICTs impact violence against civilians in ongoing conflicts. An ICT is unlikely to have an impact on civilian violence unless it intervenes early on in hostilities, or before widespread, armed conflict breaks out. Moreover, ICT officials must secure sufficient support (or leverage enforcement powers) within this window such that they can pursue a range of tasks, including the ability to conduct investigations and make arrests. When court personnel accomplish both, they can impact non-combatant violence by removing spoilers, deterring combatants, and rallying constituencies that can pressure leaders to halt atrocities. This research is based on extensive archival and interview data (over 200 semi-structured interviews) collected in The Netherlands and throughout Southeast Europe. I use this data to reconstruct narratives and ascertain patterns of events important to understanding civilian violence in each conflict. I also make use of control cases and counterfactual investigations in order to isolate ICT effects relative to other factors that could explain the course of non-combatant violence. To start, I have concentrated on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY’s) intervention in recent conflicts associated with the break-up of Yugoslavia. This preliminary focus has not only provided a complete picture of an ICT’s varied involvement in conflicts that have run their course, but it has also afforded me access to a wealth of reliable longitudinal data that does not yet exist for other cases. Moreover, these cases present interesting variation for me to explore. In the future, I intend to build on this research, focusing on International Criminal Court (ICC) and Special Tribunal for Lebanon cases where conditions important to the trajectory of civilian violence in different ex-Yugoslav conflicts vary. With the permanent ICC, the shadow of criminal prosecution now extends to modern-day conflicts. It is thus essential that we begin to understand how and when ICTs might actually contribute to limiting violence against civilians. My research constitutes an important step forward in this effort.
Dissertation Committee
Karen Alter (Chair), John Hagan, William Reno, and Hendrik Spruyt
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
Menaka Philips
Dissertation Title:
Contesting the ‘Liberal’ Paradigm: The Case of John Stuart Mill
Dissertation Description:
My dissertation examines how ‘liberalism’ is used to structure political theoretic inquiry. From the types of questions that scholars pursue, to the predispositions or assumptions they carry into interpretive work, I suggest, the discipline has become conditioned to narrowly perceive and engage political texts and problems according to a ‘liberal’ paradigm. My investigation proceeds through a rereading of JS Mill’s political writings. Mill’s writings are arguably the hardest body of work to disentangle from a ‘liberal’ interpretive paradigm, because they are so often considered to be foundational to ‘liberalism’. I aim to show however that accounts of his work, and particularly of the variation in perspectives we find across his texts, have indeed been distorted by continued efforts to interpret Mill’s political thought through ‘liberalism’. Against this, I argue that the variation in Mill’s political thought is better explained by his mode of inquiry, which operates with what I call a ‘critical uncertainty’ about the political world. That practice of uncertainty gives Mill a malleable outlook on political questions, enabling him to form judgments that at times appear disparate, or which convey differing partisan affinities. This project thus aims to do two things: first, to recover Mill’s mode of inquiry, and examine the insights it can provide into the nature and consequences of political-theoretic critique; second, it calls into question the disciplinary powers of a ‘liberal’ paradigm in political theory.
Dissertation Committee:
Mary Dietz (Chair), James Farr, Lars Tønder, Elizabeth Beaumont
Christopher Swarat
Dissertation Title
"In Other Words: A Critique of Modernism in International Relations Discourse from the Perspective of Confucian Tradition"
My dissertation centers on the “recovery” of an ancient Chinese, specifically Confucian, language and vocabulary as a means to unsettle common ways of thinking about international relations. I argue that claims to, for example, find realist sentiments or evidence of state-building in ancient Chinese texts, are cultural interpretations. These interpretations express contemporary practices, and as such distort the world they claim to “explain.” I turn the tables on this kind of reasoning by considering International Relations discourse in light of a Confucian language and vocabulary. The “translation” of International Relations discourse into this new idiom serves as an interesting way to unsettle common ways of thinking about international relations as well as suggesting new ways of looking at the world and thinking about political possibilities in it. Such possibilities are suggested through a series of vignettes that consider such words as “diplomacy,” “inside/outside,” “civilization,” and “harmony” in light of the recovered Confucian vocabulary.
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,