Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding Using 61 indicators of democratic performance from 2000 to 2018, we develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. We use this measure to test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of Read more…
What Have the Americans Ever Done for Us? Lessons from the United States in Latin America, 1895-1929 The United States spent 20 years in Afghanistan attempting to achieve two interrelated aims: reduce the level of political instability and build Afghan state capacity. It partially succeeded in the first: the Afghan Read more…
Fiscal Legibility and State Development: Theory and Evidence from Colonial Mexico We examine how fiscal legibility, the ability of a central government to observe local economic conditions for the purposes of taxation, shapes political centralization. When a ruler is unable to observe economic conditions, it can be preferable to grant Read more…
Tilly goes to Church: the Medieval and Religious Roots of European State Formation Medieval religious rivalry fundamentally shaped European state formation. The single most powerful challenger to kings and emperors in the Middle Ages was the Catholic Church. To protect its interests and ensure its autonomy, the papacy deliberately fragmented Read more…
"Restoration” and Representation: Legislative Consequences of Black Disfranchisement in the American South, 1879-1916 The restriction of African Americans' voting rights in the U.S. South in the decades following Reconstruction is the most significant instance of democratic backsliding in American history. Despite this, it remains unclear whether and to what extent Read more…
We live in a polarized political age, where support for extreme political views has increased relative to support for moderate ones. In Congress, Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines than at any point since the end of Reconstruction. In the public, Republicans and Democrats are increasingly divided Read more…
"Reducing Racial Disparities in Crime Victimization: Evidence From Employment Discrimination Litigation" Black Americans are substantially less safe than white Americans, with persistently higher risks of crime victimization. One possible cause of racial disparities in crime victimization may lie in racially disparate law enforcement responses to crime experienced by Black Read more…
PIPE Workshop: Aditya Dasgupta, UC Merced
Description
Explaining Rural Conservatism: Technological and Political Change in the Great Plains
Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not the case historically. What explains the rise of rural conservatism?
PIPE Workshop: Bocar Ba, Duke University
Police Officer Assignment and Neighborhood Crime
We develop an empirical model of the mechanism used to assign police officers to Chicago districts and examine the efficiency and equity of alternative allocations.
This paper investigates the empirical relationship between inclusion and state capacity. We examine the impact of racial discrimination on Black U.S. military enlistment during the onset of WWII.
Bar Talk: Informal Social Interactions, Alcohol Prohibition, and Invention
Empires – or political units made up of several territories and peoples, typically created by conquest and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries – have existed across recorded time, both ancient and modern. The political economy of empire as a scholarly enterprise can take several forms, including studying Read more…
The Know-Nothing Party swept to power in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1854, running on a staunchly anti-Catholic and anti-Irish platform. In this paper, we examine the contribution of various factors that have been hypothesized to contribute to the party’s success.
How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing How do judges’ previous professional experiences affect outcomes? We investigate the question by documenting the effect of judges’ previous criminal justice experience on sentencing. Leveraging millions of federal sentences from 2010 to 2019, we find Read more…
Using Digitized Newspapers to Refine Historical Measures: The Case of the Boll Weevil This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure which can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. Read more…