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 response to the growing autonomy, influence, and reach of multinational corporations. To date there are no systematic studies of why some transnational labor alliances succeed in influencing the behavior of multinational employers while others ultimately dissipate or collapse. Drawing on theoretical insights from the literature on comparative institutional analysis, industrial relations, and labor geography, I identify three forms of leverage workers utilize in transnational labor campaigns: institutional power, coalitional power, and structural power. I argue that transnational labor alliances succeed only when they utilize a form of leverage that accounts for the material interests and strategic aims of the employer in question. Additionally, labor alliances must overcome the double collective action problem of intra- and inter-union coordination. 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 the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The data, based on extensive fieldwork, reveal patterns of success and failure in transnational campaigns in the retail, security services, hotel services, and shipping and stevedoring industries.
Dissertation Committee
Kathleen Thelen (chair), James Mahoney, Benjamin I. Page
Jennifer Cyr
Dissertation Title
“From Collapse to Comeback? Understanding the Fates of Political Parties in Latin America”
My project explains a heretofore unexplored type of institutional change: party adaptation in the wake of party-system collapse. I demonstrate that, contrary to what the extant literature suggests, some political parties survive party-system collapse. Using the three cases of party-system collapse in Latin America (Peru, Venezuela, and Bolivia), I argue that political parties can persist and potentially come back at the national level when they have access to one of two types of resources. When a party has a territory-wide reserve of locales, committees, and militants at the subnational level, it will be able to compete consistently in local elections. These organizational resources are necessary for subnational persistence. When a party has a broadly accepted and unique identity attached to it, it remains a recognizable political actor and can therefore stay in the public eye even though it is not electorally viable. This social resource enables public persistence. In either case, a party survives despite the loss of credibility of its national leaders and without access to state coffers. My research thus suggests that parties can withstand party-system collapse when they have penetrated a society territorially or psychologically.
Dissertation Committee
Edward L. Gibson, James Mahoney, Jason Seawright
Christopher Day
Dissertation Title
Fates of Rebels: The Politics of Insurgency Survival and Demise
My dissertation provides an explanatory framework for why contemporary rebel groups experience different outcomes in civil war. I place these different fates along a spectrum of survival and demise to capture a wider range of outcomes beyond success or failure, rebellion or non-rebellion. Survival occurs either through a political settlement or ongoing rebellion. Demise occurs through implosion or defeat. I argue that two structural factors of rebel groups make them more likely to experience certain outcomes than others. First, a rebel group’s degree of embeddedness within state authority shapes group cohesion. Second, its degree of dependence on foreign state actors shapes how it collects and uses resources. Varying configurations of these factors shape rebel types, which are then associated with contrasting fates. I apply my typology to rebel groups in Uganda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Jammu & Kashmir. My framework stands in contrast to scholarship on the general causes of civil wars and those explanations that focus on the goals and motivations of rebels and their supporters. Such approaches tell us little about what outcomes to expect from rebellion.
Dissertation Committee
William Reno (chair), Jim Mahoney, Hendrik Spruyt
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).
Demetra Kasimis
Dissertation Title
"Drawing the Boundaries of Democracy: Immigrants, Citizens, and the Polis in Ancient Greek Contexts."
This dissertation argues that the politics of immigration in classical Athens are a central
context for interpreting the period’s theories of citizenship. I animate a hitherto overlooked,
deeply resonant strain of critique in which theorists take aim at the democracy not simply for its erasure of difference, as traditionally held. They investigate as well the differences — the harms, exclusions, and contradictions — that Athens’ equalizing operations produce and rely on producing. The key to this challenge lies in bringing the “metic” (metoikos), or resident
foreigner, ‘back’ into ancient investigations of Athenian citizenship. I contend that in the history of political thought, the displacement of the metic from the center of classical Greek theory has rendered these texts irrelevant to matters of immigration even in their own space and time. The metic’s erasure has implicitly decided some of the stakes of ancient normative debates. As a result, contemporary efforts to think about citizenship through the category and experience of the noncitizen and the strategies of exclusion that constitute membership rarely if ever turn to the ancients’ assessments of these issues for provocation. I intervene in such practices of reading to enlist the critical resources of the ancients on behalf of — and through — contemporary democratic theory. Euripides’ Ion and Plato’s Republic, the central texts of the study, mobilize metic figurations to explore the descent-based, status-oriented conception of membership espoused in the myth of autochthony, which privileges blood over acts. Both texts are efforts to re-write the myth, which encourages a culture of secrecy, blackmail, exposure, and effortlessness. In different ways, the authors argue that the ‘natural’ categories of standing the city bestows do not correspond with or decide one’s experience of membership in the city. By troubling the logic that underlies the democratic order of inclusion, the Ion and the Republic join a tradition, practiced primarily by contemporary political theorists, that sees the nativism running through democratic society’s descent rules for membership to be at odds with its own overt commitments to political equality, active participation, productivity, and inclusion.
https://sites.google.com/site/demetrakasimis/
Dissertation Committee
Sara Monoson, Bonnie Honig, Mary Dietz, Richard Kraut
Erin Kimball
Dissertation Title
Peacekeeping for Approval: The Rise of African-led Interventions
Dissertation Committee
Will Reno (Chair), Karen Alter, Gary Goertz and Hendrik Spruyt
Theories of collective action argue that a large group of states should be incapable of acting together to bring about the provision of a common good. Yet despite their inherent weakness, African regional organizations have implemented several peacekeeping missions since the end of the Cold War, displaying a puzzling level of cooperation among African states. This study finds the reason for this cooperation in the payoffs that lie in the domestic politics of the countries that participate in these interventions and most particularly in the relationships with foreigners that are integral elements of the domestic political strategies of these regimes. Specifically, African leaders are contributing troops to peacekeeping operations to gain the approval of western states. The diplomatic and military benefits that comprise this approval allow African countries to retard liberalization processes, making peacekeeping a strategic tool for authoritarian leaders seeking to maintain power.
Kendra Koivu
Dissertation Title
"Institutions, Property, and the Evolution of Organized Crime. "
Dissertation Committee
Will Reno (Chair), Jim Mahoney, Kathy Thelen
Angela Maione
Dissertation Title
The Political Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft
Dissertation Committee
Linda Zerilli (Chair), Mary Dietz, and Ann Orloff
Romain Malejacq
Dissertation Title
Warlords and the State System (Afghanistan, 1992-2010)
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
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 S. Reagan
Dissertation Title
"Mimesis in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)"
This dissertation argues that the style of Leviathan is related to its ethical and political content. In my view, political agency in the Hobbesian commonwealth derives from the mimetic dynamics of natural law following and covenanting. In the introduction, Hobbes invites the reader to, nosce tiepsum, or read thyself, intentionally mistranslating the Socratic ethical principle, know thyself, in describing the aims of Leviathan’s style. I argue that nosce tiepsum draws on Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics to articulate the way mimetic dynamics in reading or auditing a story relate to self-knowledge. I argue that within mimetic dynamics, agency is possible, and this agency can direct ethics and politics. Finding the ethical and political possibilities for the citizen of the Hobbesian commonwealth in the mimetic dynamics of the text resolves the question of how to characterize Hobbes’s humanism. The problem in the secondary literature is the false choice between scientific and humanistic readings of Leviathan. Readings which explore Hobbes’s scientific worldview, conclude his mechanico-materialist psychology results in no political agency, ethics or politics. On the other hand, readings of Leviathan focusing on the humanist inheritance of the text tend to mischaracterize the normative philosophy by ignoring Hobbes’s new mechanico materialist view of the will. The problem lies in the question of the character of the normative philosophy resulting from the ethical imperative of know thyself. Leo Strauss for example does not remain true to Hobbes’s psychology in amalgamating Hobbes’s poetics with Hegel’s historical dialectic and with Kant’s account of right intentions. Quentin Skinner’s humanist reading cannot resolve the Hobbesian man with the vir civilis, the Latin rhetorical tradition’s ideal citizen, although Skinner’s argument is that the meaning of Hobbes as a humanist is in his relation to this tradition. Reading the mimetic dynamics as potentially norm creating and sustaining allows me to show that Hobbesian psychology is not entirely deterministic, and that his ethics and politics articulate an account of human self-assertion which betrays influence from both traditions, humanism and early modern science.
Dissertation Committee
Sara Monoson (Chair), Lars Tønder, Peter Fenves
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,