Browsing by Subject "Political economy"

This dissertation explores how, during the seventeenth century, the rival Dutch (VOC) and English (EIC) East India Companies forged a corporate political economy that transcended national political and economic frameworks. The dissertation argues that the half-century between 1600 and 1650 was characterized by state dominance over the companies’ dealings, and mutual alienation between officials of the EIC and the VOC. However, in response to external challenges and opportunities, during the 1650s, company officials developed shared commercial, capital, and communication networks that integrated institutions and ideologies from across Europe and Asia, forming a common body of practice and thought. The dissertation’s analysis of company, state, and personal records reveals how this inter-corporate organization facilitated the evolution of the language and concepts of economic competition, political conflict, and international law. This dissertation challenges notions of “modern” private, collaborative regulatory regimes, while simultaneously introducing a non-state global organization as an influential force in early modern economic and political history.

This project draws into conversation previously unrelated sources from archives throughout the U.K. and the Netherlands, as well as Cape Town, adding a new dimension to the history of European empires, political institutions, and the patterns of global economic organization and governance. The dissertation is situated at the intersection of early modern history, political history, legal history, and economic history; fields which focus on the roles of the rival companies in the coalescence of national bodies of political and economic policy. By combining the study of economic and legal institutions with the analysis of the durable patterns and trends of intra-Asian and Eurasian exchanges, the project examines the formation of political economy as lived experience in a global integrative process.

This dissertation shows how an array of policymakers, invested in uprooting an unequal political economy descended from the plantation system and Jim Crow, gravitated to education as a centerpiece of development strategy, and why so many are still disappointed in its outcomes. By looking at state-wide policymaking in North Carolina and policy effects in the state’s black belt counties, this study shows why the civil rights movement was vital for shifting state policy in former Jim Crow states towards greater investment in human resources. By breaking down employment barriers to African Americans and opening up the South to new people and ideas, the civil rights movement fostered a new climate for economic policymaking, and a new ecosystem of organizations flourished to promote equitable growth. At first, they sought to create a high-wage economy based on the industrial North. But as branch-plant recruitment faltered as a development strategy, these policy advocates turned to worker co-operatives, entrepreneurial incubators, and improved education as an alternative. Kids were the new cash crop in part because policymakers came to believe that economic growth—for the locality, for the state, for the nation, for all countries at all times—depended on innovators and entrepreneurs. American workers, too expensive to perform physically grueling industrial chores in an unevenly governed global economy, had to be ready and willing to toss away old skills and acquire new ones to fit whatever tasks the innovators found humans still useful to perform. By stressing the economic value of education, these policy advocates succeeded—for a time—in boosting state and local spending. But this came at the cost of democratic rationales for public schools. Moreover, this approach failed to stabilize rural communities hurt by manufacturing job losses.

The last two decades have seen an emergence of a new regime type, called mixed regimes, whose democratically elected leaders have slowly eroded institutions of accountability. Unlike democratic breakdowns, such erosions take place in incremental steps, which create uncertainties about what the cumulative effects of these steps will lead to in the future. This dissertation focuses on media and information manipulation to understand how unconstrained leaders use media to sustain popular support and how they leverage such uncertainties for their benefit. I first analyze how governments in mixed regimes manipulate the informational environment in an era of conglomerate-owned media. I argue that state contracts in non-media sectors represent an essential tool for influencing media coverage. I use machine learning to construct a media bias measure and analyze the universe of all state contracts and a vast corpus of newspaper articles from Turkey. I show that conglomerate-owned newspapers are more pro-government than other newspapers. More importantly, this bias grows with the government’s discretion. In return, these conglomerates secure state contracts on favorable terms. Chapter 3 takes the analysis further and analyzes specific information manipulation strategies in captured media. In particular, I answer the following question: how do governments in mixed regimes manipulate economic news in times of economic crisis? Although economic crises may cause regimes to collapse, we see that unconstrained leaders in mixed regimes are resilient even in times of crisis. Using the 2021 currency crisis from Turkey and analyzing the entire corpora of three media outlets, this chapter examines the prevalence of different information manipulation strategies using various machine learning and dictionary methods. While these two chapters focus on media, Chapter 4 instead focuses on how such information manipulation strategies affect citizens in critical junctures, e.g., when asked about institutional changes that pave the way for unconstrained executives. In this chapter, I argue that aspiring unconstrained leaders are more likely to gain popular support when they present checks and balances as obstacles to getting things done. In doing so, these leaders exploit a critical tension between the possibility of gridlock and the abuse of power, which is inherent in democratic institutions. Using cross-national data and leveraging an original survey experiment from Turkey, I show that effective checks and balances decrease democracy satisfaction and that aspiring unconstrained leaders are more likely to gain popular support when they present these institutions as obstacles to getting things done. More interestingly, respondents perceive their gridlock justification to dismantle checks and balances as a pro-democratic attempt to remove the barriers to a policy-responsive regime. Overall, this dissertation project helps us understand how information manipulation in mixed regimes sustains popular support for unconstrained leaders.

My dissertation project is an ethnographic history of "homes of capital," merchant homes located in port-cities of Gujarat in various states of splendor and decrepitude, which continue to mark a long history of Indian Ocean cross-cultural trade and exchange. Located in western South Asia, Gujarat is a terraqueous borderland, connecting the western and eastern arenas of the Indian Ocean at the same time as it connects territorial South Asia to maritime markets. Gujarat's dynamic port-cities, including Rander, Surat and Bombay, were and continue to be home to itinerant merchants, many with origins and investments around the littoral from Arabia to Southeast Asia. I argue that rather than a point of origin or return, Gujarat's merchants--many of whom are themselves itinerants from Arabia, Persia and Northwest India--produce and produced Gujarat as a place of arrival and departure: as a crucible of mobility. Gujarat's merchant homes offer a model of transregional engagement produced through the itineraries of merchants who continue to see the regions bordering the Indian Ocean as an extension of their homes.

While historians have generally studied these merchants through the bureaucratic archival records of imperial trade-companies, my project examines the yet-unexplored archives that collect around historic merchant homes. Curated by a current generation of merchant families who continue to ply old routes at the same time as they forge new ones, merchant homes offer a way to study oceanic connections from the inside-out and capital in cultural terms. Drawing on a rich array of collective and personal ethnographic and historical materials within homes, including architectural form; material objects; private journals, datebooks and travelogues; visual media; and merchant memory, my project brings into view a mercantile space-time on ocean's edge. Though emerging from concrete ethnographic and historical materials that cast powerful light on Gujarati merchant mobility in the British Empire over the course of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, my account of "homes of capital" pursues mercantile imaginings across long tranches of time routed through the political economic transformations of the period stretching between the tenth and twelfth centuries. I argue that these non-linear imaginings structured by oceanic mobility exist in the interstices of imperial, colonial and post-colonial state space.

Placing merchant imaginings at the center of my analysis, my dissertation argues that the Indian Ocean was and continues to be a key spatial and temporal motivator of mercantile life. My project makes explicit the terms of this intimacy through a "chronotopic" study of merchant homes across Gujarat. Homes of capital in its broadest sense also include mercantile buildings like bridges, libraries, funerary sites, mosques and community centers, which, when linked together, created shaded pathways across the region in the face of an emergent colonial state centered on Bombay. In doing so I also reveal a more capacious mercantile subject, showing how new kinds of nineteenth-century circulations of Gujarati-language texts across merchant libraries, reading rooms and homes were embedded in and shaped a longue durée oceanic topography. My project documents the range of visual, material, textual and affective modes from within this topography through which merchants gave and give form to such a terraqueous region.

Urbanization in the global south has made the relationship between ethnic proximity and politics increasingly important. The literature mainly studies either the social or the political effects of proximity, without distinguishing between them or exploring their relationship to one another. I reconcile the two sides of this literature by developing a theory about the relationship between the social and the political consequences of ethnic proximity. To measure heterogeneity and proximity in dynamic and data-poor urban environments, I develop novel measurements of individual outgroup exposure and neighborhood-level segregation. To test my theory, I apply the exposure metric to original data from slums in three Indian cities, and find support for my claim that proximity has distinct effects on social and political relations between groups. I then explore the relationship between neighborhood-level collective action and social mobility. I find that collective political mobilization has a substantial impact on lived outcomes, through the mechanism of services.

Sustainable management of marine natural resources, and the social-ecological systems in which they are embedded, presents one of the most significant challenges in contemporary environmental policy. Despite improvement in the ecological sustainability and economic performance of fisheries in the United States, these trends are not universal and management remains highly contentious. With fisheries moving towards more collaborative and participatory policy processes, understanding how social and economic relations among stakeholders may influence institutional change is critical to supporting democratic and effective resource management. This dissertation builds on research from common-pool resource theory and political economy to explore the incentives and processes of self-governance in fisheries embedded in global commercial supply chains and state management institutions. It contributes to our understanding of participatory policy-making by addressing the research questions: Why and how do resource users self-govern through the policy process? How are policy preferences and negotiations shaped by market structures and social relations of production?

These questions are investigated empirically by tracing market and policy changes over time in a commercial, small-scale, U.S. fishery. This dissertation examines origins and evolution of regulations, cooperative management institutions, and commercialization processes in the California sea urchin fishery, where harvesters and processors have seen major shifts in market geography and structure, and have initiated self-governance through the state’s policy process. Using a multi-level governance framework and institutional analysis tools, this dissertation draws on document archives, interviews and participant observation of policy and commercial production processes to construct a detailed policy history. It incorporates micro- and macro-level trade data and employs global value chain analyses to examine shifting seafood market geographies over time, and uniquely synthesizes the parallel economic and political timelines to explore dynamic interactions between them, focusing on how markets and other social and ecological factors shaped motivations in crafting policy.

Overall, this research reveals a diverse set of values and incentives at the heart of policy choice and change in the fishery. Cooperative management can be a tool to meet the costs of regulating (time, money, information and political leverage), evolving as participants learn and build social capital through the collective action experience, and adjust collective goals in response social and ecological change. States can empower effective producer collective action through particularly forms of institutional support, such as oversight to hold leaders accountable to members. Findings also reveal complex dynamic linkages between markets, harvesting strategies, and policy choice. Regulations are crafted to match market conditions, equitably distribute costs among divers, processors, and the state, and achieve other social objectives such as intergenerational access and individual freedom. They are also adjusted in response to changing markets, outcomes of previous regulations, and state policy agendas. Together, these findings can inform ongoing efforts to move towards participatory and cooperative fisheries management, particularly in the U.S. and similar contexts, by revealing the specific ways that commercial seafood markets shape, and are shaped by, the policy process and regulatory outcomes.

Scholars contend that in a weak institutional context, firms enter the political marketplace primarily through bribery or entrepreneurs running for public office. My dissertation challenges this conventional understanding by arguing that revolving-door channels have become a prevalent means of rent-seeking when within-government career opportunities are rare for public officials and the private sector is profitable. This dissertation proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of revolving-door officials in authoritarian regimes and tests this framework through a rigorous inquiry of firms in China. The three papers that constitute this work analyze the pattern, formation, and economic outcome of hiring revolving-door officials. I show the distortionary impact of post-government career concerns on public resource allocation, a mixed revolving-door recruitment strategy adopted by firms seeking both political power and regulatory expertise, and the salient signaling effect of revolving-door connections on financial investors.

“Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry” examines factory-level efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerized, post-Fordist production. By focusing on labor in the enterprise, it reveals that many of the characteristics typically associated with capitalist flexible production were present in the Soviet Union by the mid-1960s. To the extent that flexible production represents the social corollary of neoliberal political theory, “Making Socialism Work” helps to explain continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political economies.

This dissertation examines the variation in the choice of FDI regulations. Why do some countries restrict the entry and operations of foreign MNEs while others permit and even seek inward FDI? What factors determine the choice of FDI regulations and what conditions are likely to bring about their reform? This study identifies the political dynamics leading to the improvement or deterioration of investment climates in transition economies and beyond.

I argue that FDI policies depend on the level of political competition and the anticipated distributional implications of FDI liberalization for the main constituencies that back the government in office. Democratic governments, which derive political power from domestic workers who benefit from investments by foreign firms, liberalize FDI regulations. By contrast, non-democratic leaders, who fear that FDI would upset the balance of domestic economic power and undermine the privileged position of domestic industrialists who support the regime, continue to restrict foreign investment.

I examine the choice of FDI regulations using a newly constructed database of FDI regulations in 28 transition economies between 1989 and 2008, an index of investment freedom available for a worldwide sample starting in 1994, and changes over time in three complementary case studies. The statistical analysis reveals that higher levels of political competition are associated with greater openness to FDI and the case study research shows that both increases and decreases in the level of political competition lead to the revision of the FDI legislation. While democratization has brought about more liberal FDI policies, the consolidation of authoritarian regimes has been followed by stricter FDI regulations.

From 2008-2012, a dramatic upsurge in incidents of maritime piracy in the Western Indian Ocean led to renewed global attention to this region: including the deployment of multi national naval patrols, attempts to prosecute suspected pirates, and the development of financial interdiction systems to track and stop the flow of piracy ransoms. Largely seen as the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land, piracy has been slotted into narratives of state failure and problems of governance and criminality in this region.

This view fails to account for a number of factors that were crucial in making possible the unprecedented rise of Somali piracy and its contemporary transformation. Instead of an emphasis on failed states and crises of governance, my dissertation approaches maritime piracy within a historical and regional configuration of actors and relationships that precede this round of piracy and will outlive it. The story I tell in this work begins before the contemporary upsurge of piracy and closes with a foretaste of the itineraries beyond piracy that are being crafted along the East African coast.

Beginning in the world of port cities in the long nineteenth century, my dissertation locates piracy and the relationship between trade, plunder, and state formation within worlds of exchange, including European incursions into this oceanic space. Scholars of long distance trade have emphasized the sociality engendered through commerce and the centrality of idioms of trust and kinship in structuring mercantile relationships across oceanic divides. To complement this scholarship, my work brings into view the idiom of protection: as a claim to surety, a form of tax, and a moral claim to authority in trans-regional commerce.

To build this theory of protection, my work combines archival sources with a sustained ethnographic engagement in coastal East Africa, including the pirate ports of Northern Somalia, and focuses on the interaction between land-based pastoral economies and maritime trade. This connection between land and sea calls attention to two distinct visions of the ocean: one built around trade and mobility and the other built on the ocean as a space of extraction and sovereignty. Moving between historical encounters over trade and piracy and the development of a national maritime economy during the height of the Somali state, I link the contemporary upsurge of maritime piracy to the confluence of these two conceptualizations of the ocean and the ideas of capture, exchange, and redistribution embedded within them.

The second section of my dissertation reframes piracy as an economy of protection and a form of labor implicated within other legal and illegal economies in the Indian Ocean. Based on extensive field research, including interviews with self-identified pirates, I emphasize the forms of labor, value, and risk that characterize piracy as an economy of protection. The final section of my dissertation focuses on the diverse international, regional, and local responses to maritime piracy. This section locates the response to piracy within a post-Cold War and post-9/11 global order and longer attempts to regulate and assuage the risks of maritime trade. Through an ethnographic focus on maritime insurance markets, navies, and private security contractors, I analyze the centrality of protection as a calculation of risk and profit in the contemporary economy of counter-piracy.

Through this focus on longer histories of trade, empire, and regulation my dissertation reframes maritime piracy as an economy of protection straddling boundaries of land and sea, legality and illegality, law and economy, and history and anthropology.

This dissertation investigates how politically-expedient decisions and resource constraints create winners and losers on the path toward development, focusing on slum evictions, public recordkeeping, and public health crisis response. This manuscript extends findings from prior scholarship on the politics and consequences of redistribution to understand decision-making in the context of urban informality and Covid-19 crisis response in India. I combine survey data with webscraping and remote sensing techniques to study why some urban slums were evicted while others were left intact; which areas experienced underreporting of Covid-19 mortality; and where government directed limited Covid-19 vaccine stocks. I find evidence that greater local economic activity was associated with evictions, that Covid-19 mortality counts were lower in areas aligned with the ruling coalition, and that Covid-19 vaccination supplies were strategically directed to areas of electoral importance to the ruling coalition. Taken together, these findings show that, even during crises, electoral incentives shape policy.

The intellectual historian Gabriel Paquette has identified the propaganda language of the eighteenth-century Spanish Bourbon monarchy with a “pliable rhetoric of public happiness” of which the monarchy claimed to be “linchpin.” In a process beginning in the sixteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, the phrase “public happiness” had substantially replaced the “common good” in Spanish political thought. This project excavates the emergence of Spanish civic eudaemonism from Renaissance debates on reason of state, demonstrating the historical processes by which it repeatedly changed hands in subsequent centuries. Civic eudaemonism allowed Renaissance authors to allude to reason of state without instrumentalizing virtue, thereby putting the needs of the State over the doctrinal demands of the Church. The result was a new emphasis on the absolute sovereignty of the monarch, on whose shoulders rested the secular happiness of Spain. There was no consensual definition of public happiness. At the turn of the seventeenth century the sum of justice, security and civic virtue was meant. Later in the century the definition of mercantile success appeared, and by 1750 justice and virtue were disappearing. After 1780 mercantile definitions gave way to the personal industry of individual subjects, independent of regal influence and taken collectively. Public happiness, although associated with regalism throughout Europe, appeared earliest in Italy and Spain; in Spain it took longest to defeat the individual otherworldly happiness promised in Christianity. In Spain, as elsewhere, the alliance with regalism collapsed as soon as Christianity was purged from political writing.

This dissertation examines the relationship between city planning and everyday life in Kigali, Rwanda. It focuses on markets, neighborhoods, and streets where Kigali residents encounter emerging technologies of architecture, finance, and expertise. These technologies are aimed at converting Kigali into a global metropolis with world-class tourist facilities, hi-tech service industries, and a “green” urban metabolism. Many city residents, however, experience these processes through mass evictions, market closures, and an ongoing utility crisis in the city. In response, they are going kukikoboyi (literally “to cowboy”), creating rogue markets, housing settlements, and ad-hoc utility networks. While Kigali’s international team of managers and consultants disavow these spaces and practices as informal, illegal, and antithetical to the city’s “world-class” future, they are nevertheless unable to erase them from the city’s surface. My research explores these divergent practices of city-making to show that a new Kigali is being built: a 21st century metropolis that, despite being a rogue version of its planned future, is a cosmopolitan urban center that no single interest, process, or population fully controls. Methodologically, this dissertation places the popular practices and expertise that hold a city together in conversation with global city modeling and design theory. Instead of focusing on a single neighborhood or population, The Kigali Model is an ethnography of an entire city that asks how differently situated social actors share the costs of producing, subverting, and negotiating their urban future. During twenty-seven months of fieldwork in Kigali, I interviewed foreign technocrats who were employed by multinational design and consultancy firms, paid by international finance organizations, and housed in Rwandan government ministries. I spent months following illegal street traders as they produced nomadic market spaces and (often correctly) anticipated that city authorities would be unable to enforce new zoning and tax laws. I participated in community infrastructure building projects and—when the pipes we laid failed to deliver services—became myself incorporated into the city’s hydraulic system by lugging twenty-liter jerry cans of water up forty-degree slopes. I also mapped the social and economic networks that produce and continually re-make Kigali’s largest “slum,” and debated views of urban modernity with second-hand clothing vendors, their hipster clients, and planners who wish to demolish the markets that both populations depend on. I use these ethnographic encounters to theorize Kigali beyond the categories of slum, crisis, and laboratory so often applied to African cities. I show how these seemingly disparate spaces, populations, and practices produce urban ecologies, cultures, and human and material infrastructures that persistently reinvent the city and the people who live there.

Political factors play a big role in influencing the ebbs and flows of corruption. The literature seems unanimously in agreement that, even in places where corruption is entrenched and systemic, the political calculations of individual politicians can still have an impact on corruption outcomes. On the other hand, while canonical research has delved into the divergent inner workings of different types of corruption for decades, studies on the link between politics and corruption have not paid sufficient attention to these distinctions. This dissertation speaks to the idea that politics influences different types of corruption differently in different settings. I seek to shed some light on how types of corruption and political contexts matter by studying wrongdoing at local governments in Vietnam. A contribution of the dissertation is the data collection efforts to acquire novel datasets. I got access to fine-grained data on bribery behavior at Vietnamese firms by working on the survey team for the Vietnam Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) for four years. On the politics side, I constructed a dataset on the career paths of Vietnamese provincial leaders since late 1990s, using information from newspapers, administrative almanacs, and various Internet sources.

How can we explain the significant variation in the organization and performance of public bureaucracies across countries, across regions, and between the levels of the administrative hierarchy? Considering the high level of path dependence in bureaucratic organization, this dissertation explains divergence in the institutions of public administrations through a set of historical analyses focused on the 19th and early 20th centuries–a time period crucial for the establishment of modern bureaucracies. The second chapter deals with the influence of socio-economic groups in countries that enjoyed domestic political autonomy. Three social classes had fundamentally different interests in the organization of the state apparatus, and their relative political influence was a key factor determining its organizational characteristics. The third and fourth chapters deal with the impact of foreign rule on the bureaucratic organization of countries that did not enjoy domestic political autonomy. Specifically, the third chapter focuses on within-country regional variation in bureaucratic organization and provides an in-depth study of Poland, which was historically ruled by three empires with vastly different bureaucracies. I develop an account of path dependence and suggest that persisting differences in culture and perceptions of public administration are key drivers of regional divergence. Finally, the fourth chapter focuses on variation in bureaucratic organization between levels of the administrative hierarchy and provides an in-depth study of Romania, which was historically partially ruled by the Habsburg Empire and partially autonomous. I develop a theoretical framework of imperial pervasiveness that explains differential effectiveness of external rule along the administrative hierarchy.

This dissertation critically examines predominant political-economic theories of public credit and public debt in light of the origins, development, and recent record expansion in such debt. Using a "history of thought" approach, I focus on those aspects of theory, from three main schools of thought - Classical, Keynesian, and Public Choice - which seek to explain the evolution of public debt, its political-economic causes and effects, the meaning of sustainability in public debt burdens, and the conditions under which governments are likely to monetize or repudiate their debts. For empirical context, I also provide three centuries of data on public debt for major nations, relative to their national income, and government bond-yield data for more recent decades.

There is value in classifying the major political economists who have examined public credit and public debt since 1700 as "pessimists," "optimists" or "realists."

Public debt pessimists argue that government provides no truly productive services, that its taxing and borrowing detract from the private economy, while unfairly burdening future generations, and that high and rising public leverage ratios are unsustainable and will likely cause national insolvency and long-term economic ruin. When public debts become excessive or un-payable, pessimists advise explicit default or deliberate repudiation. Public debt pessimists also believe financiers in general and public bondholders in particular are unproductive. Pessimists usually endorse smaller-sized governments and free markets. With few exceptions, most public debt pessimists appear in the Classical or Public Choice schools of thought. Among prominent public debt pessimists, the most representative are David Hume and Adam Smith.

Public debt optimists believe that government provides not only productive services, such as infrastructure and social insurance, but means to mitigate what they perceived to be "market failures," including savings gluts, economic depressions, inflation, and secular stagnation. Optimists contend that deficit-spending and public debt accumulation can stimulate or sustain economy activity and ensure full employment, without burdening present or future generation. To the extent public debts become excessive or un-payable, optimists tend to advise implicit default, by official and deliberate debasement of the national currency (inflation). As do pessimists, public debt optimists view financiers and bondholders as essentially unproductive. Optimists also defend a relatively larger economic role for the state. Almost without exception, optimists reside in the Keynesian school of political-economic thought. Among the leading optimists, the most representative are Alvin Hansen and Abba Lerner.

Public debt realists contend that government can and should provide certain productive services, mainly national defense, police protection, courts of justice, and basic infrastructure, but that social and redistributive schemes tend to undermine national prosperity. Realists say public debt should fund only services and projects that help a free economy maximize its potential, and that analysis must be contextualized - i.e., related to a nation's credit capacity, productivity, and taxable capacity. According to realists, public leverage is neither inevitably harmful, as pessimists say, nor infinite, as optimists say. Realists view financiers as productive and insist that sovereigns redeem their public debts in full, on time, and in sound money. Realists favor constitutionally-limited yet energetic governments that help promote robust markets. They appear mainly in the Classical era of political-economic thought. The most representative and renowned of the public debt realists are Sir James Steuart and Alexander Hamilton.

My main thesis is that public debt realists provide the most persuasive theories of public credit and public debt, and thus the most plausible interpretations of the long, fascinating history of public debt. Moreover, certain puzzles and paradoxes arising in contemporary public debt experience, among developed nations - including the recent, multi-decade trend of simultaneously rising public-leverage ratios and declining public debt yields - is explicable primarily in realist terms. In contrast, public debt pessimists and optimists alike offer unbalanced, inadequate accounts of public debt experience. Whereas pessimists are too often confused or mistaken in foreseeing an alleged "inevitable" ruin from public debt, optimists more often than not are confused and mistaken about the alleged "stimulus" attainable by large-scale deficit-spending and debt build-ups. Looking ahead, the realist perspective is likely to provide superior guideposts for maximally-accurate interpretations of public debt policies and trends.

It is a fundamental assertion in political science that political parties in government allocate resources disproportionately to benefit the people who have voted for them and for projects that push forward their political agenda. However, this literature ignores the structural (network) limitations of policy making. By creating a new network model which depicts the structure and growth of loosely coupled religious organizations, I create a taxonomy of religious denominations and examine how their network structure affects their likelihood of receiving government support. I test this relationship empirically in the United States and Israel. In the United States, I examine President Bush’s Faith Based Initiative, which was expected to channel government funding mostly to conservative, white, southern churches. In Israel, I research the education systems of the different religious sectors and how much government support they receive, the common belief being that the ultra-orthodox receive the most. Using network modeling, formal modeling and instrumental variable analysis, I show that despite expectations, in the United States conservative congregations did not receive more funding and in Israel not all ultra-orthodox networks receive high levels of support. The significant predictor, in both cases, for receiving funding is the network structure of the denominations, where more hierarchical denominations are more likely to receive funding than those organized in a dispersed network structure.

This dissertation will contend that China’s paramount leader, the General Secretary,

in order to compete with rival elites, in the face of strong institutional constraints

and limitations upon how they can engage in that competition, manipulates the

distribution of state fiscal resources to benefit their political clients in the provinces.

This newly empowered client network aid their political survival in office and is

constitutive of their political influence both while in office and after they have left it.

Specifically, the dissertation expects that the General Secretary will direct greater

amounts of intergovernmental transfers into provinces which are run by their political

clients. More narrowly, it expects that the effect will be found only for specific-

purpose transfers, which are largely under the discretion of the incumbent General

Secretary, and will not be found for general-purpose transfers, the allocation of which

is less subject to political manipulation by the incumbent. These transfers, in turn,

generate additional taxable economic activity in the provinces into which they are

directed. This augmented taxable economic activity leads to increased collection of

fiscal revenue in the provinces of incumbent clients. This, in turn, makes these clients

more promising candidates for future advancement within the party, because fiscal

revenue collection is a core metric for the advancement of elites at the provincial level,

as adjudicated by the CCP’s organization department. Consequently, incumbent

General Secretaries are able to push forward the careers of their provincial clients,

and thus advance their own political interests, through systematic favoritism in their

ivdistribution of specific purpose intergovernmental transfers. Importantly, one of the

key theoretical results of this work is the finding that Chinese central leaders are

institutionally constrained to make their clients measure up and that the artificial

augmentation of the provincial fiscal revenues of clients are a key means by which they

ensure that their clients ”make the grade” in the eyes of the organization department.

This dissertation is comprised of three essays on the political economy of the Philippines. It combines a variety of methods---historical and qualitative analysis, interviews, and statistical analysis---to examine various aspects of the interaction of politics and economics in the country. The first chapter examines the relationship between horizontal political dynasties and economic outcomes. I argue that horizontal dynasties---more than one member of a political family holding office simultaneously---allow members of the dynasties to coordinate over policy by circumventing veto points in the policy processes. This leads to higher spending on public goods. I further show that this increase in spending is not associated with improved development, suggesting that the increased spending is used inefficiently. The second chapter examines the interaction of rank and gender norms in dynastic politics. I argue that male candidates are more likely to replace higher ranking female, candidates, but the inverse is not true. This rationalizes existing strategies by dynasties such as benchwarming. The third chapter argues for the positive long-run effect of the colonial Catholic mission. Municipalities that had a colonial mission are more developed and have higher levels of state capacity today. This is because missions functioned as de facto states and vehicles for the establishment of local government. This chapter emphasizes that missions were not merely religious or educational institutions but vehicles for governance.