Prior Fellows

Impact of violence on the formation of children’s social preferences in the Sahel region of Africa

Project Abstract
How does growing up in conditions of extreme adversity impacts the formation of prosocial and antisocial preferences? To answer this question, our project will examine the development of social preferences in vulnerable children in the turbulent Sahel region of Africa. We will evaluate fairness preferences, altruism, anti-social preferences, and conformity to social norms that underpin a healthy and nourishing social fabric. Field experiments utilizing behavioral economics games on social preferences will be conducted with children in two geographically distinct regions of Burkina Faso and Mali: one in the southwest relatively peaceful area, and one in the northeast currently suffering from violence triggered by Islamist militant incursions.

These data will contribute to our knowledge of the influence of early exposure to violence on the formation of social preferences. They will also be used to inform interventions to foster prosocial motivations, social values, attitudes, and social norms that promote cooperation. This collaborative project with institutions of higher education in Burkina Faso, France, and the US will use a multi-disciplinary approach of education, behavioral economics, and developmental psychology. This project also brings a unique opportunity for educating undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty in behavioral economics and psychology in a developing part of the world, which is largely underrepresented in academic research.

Biography
Dr. Jean Decety is a French-American social neuroscientist. He is the Irving B. Harris Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and its College. His work and teaching focus on social cognition, particularly morality, empathy, social influence, and prosocial behavior. His discoveries have led to new understandings of social-emotional processes in children and adults, as well as in incarcerated criminal psychopaths. His research uses functional neuroimaging techniques (functional MRI, and high-density EEG), coupled with methods from cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to determine how biological and social factors dynamically interact in contributing to decision-making and the motivation to care for the welfare of others. Jean Decety currently explores the impact of extreme ethnic violence exposure on children's distributive justice decisions, and considerations of justice and fairness. This research is being conducted in different African countries. Decety also examines how and why strong moral convictions can facilitate engagement in violent actions.

Discipling Democracy: Understanding Popular Support for Extrajudicial Killings in Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines 

Project Abstract
The administration of Rodrigo Duterte has overseen an unprecedented level of violence in Philippine politics. Despite this violence, Filipinos largely support both the drug war and the Duterte administration. How do we explain widespread popular support for large-scale public violence? Prior research suggests that Filipinos are willing to tolerate extrajudicial killings, political repression, and the gutting of liberal institutions because they see Duterte as a “strong leader” whose methods, while questionable, are nonetheless effective. These views reflect long-held feelings of political alienation and aspirations for political renovation. Thus, in order to understand Filipinos’ acceptance of Duterte’s violence, we need to unpack their relationship to democracy and politics generally. The proposed research pursues the following questions: How do Filipinos conceive of democracy and what do they want from it? How have these conceptions changed over the course of the democratic period? How have the country’s political institutions shaped these conceptions? These questions require us to go deeper than the existing data allow. They call for an in-depth qualitative study of Filipinos’ political dispositions involving a combination of ethnographic and historical methods.

A Global-Scale Investigation of Firm-level Economic Recovery from Natural Disasters

Project Abstract 
We aim to understand the mechanisms through which natural disasters can affect national economies around the world, using a novel combination of economic and earth science data and methods. Historically, economists have believed that disasters are “good for business,” and increase economic growth. However, a major challenge in understanding what actually occurs empirically has been the lack of cross-disciplinary engagement between social and physical sciences, as disasters are defined and measured inappropriately for socioeconomic questions. In response, recent economic research using methods from earth science has shown that, when measured correctly, disasters suppressed economic growth for decades. The mechanisms are not yet understood, but theory suggests that long-term economic damage must be due to changes in investment behavior in the economy. Therefore, we investigate disaster effects at the firm-level, since firms are the driver of economic growth and investment within a country. Our focus is earthquakes and hurricanes, which are global in scope and affect roughly half of the countries on Earth. Using extensive firm-level data from dozens of countries combined with novel data on disaster exposure, we examine firm dynamics after a disaster strikes. Understanding mechanisms is particularly important as this would guide policy responses that will help society better cope with natural disasters.

Biography
Amir Jina is an Assistant Professor at University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, researching how economic and social development is shaped by the environment. He uses methods from economics, climate science, and remote sensing to understand the impacts of climate in rich and poor countries, and has conducted fieldwork in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Uganda. Amir is a founding member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration estimating the costs of climate change to society all over the world with state-of-the-art empirical methods. Amirreceived his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development and M.A. in Climate and Society from Columbia University, B.A.s in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, and previously worked with the Red Cross/Red Crescent in South Asia and as a high school teacher in Japan.  

Sovereigns and Subjects: Indigenous Nations within the British Atlantic Empire

Project Abstract
This project examines Indigenous nations that exerted a subtle but profound influence on the evolution of the British empire from within. It focuses on “tributary” nations: those who accepted (though often through coercion and violence) a status as subjects of the king. Even Native nations that experienced violent subjugation could exert power by embracing the “subject” category, using the rights it conferred to defend their communities against the ravages of colonialism.

Through their engagement with British political culture, Indigenous peoples transformed it. Native leaders articulated creative new possibilities for divided sovereignty and pluralist empire, staking a claim for an Indigenous future. Imperial administrators, already overseeing a composite empire of diverse peoples, could embrace such visions as viable forms of imperial governance. However, Native articulations of sovereignty provoked reactions from settlers, who came to view the rights of Indigenous subjects as intolerable assaults on their rights and articulated their own visions of the imperial body politic that were strikingly at odds with those of their countrymen in Britain.

Spanning the early modern British empire from the Caribbean to Canada, this project recovers the accomplishments of Indigenous intellectuals in shaping the terms of their subjection. It will illuminate the influence of Native political thought on the revolutionary remaking of British subjects into American citizens and on the evolution of modern concepts of sovereignty.

Biography
Matthew Kruer is Assistant Professor of Early North American History and the College at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. His first book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2022), is based on a doctoral dissertation that was awarded the 2016 Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. Kruer has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, Library Company of Philadelphia, University of Oxford, American Philosophical Society, American Historical Society, Virginia Historical Society, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Huntington, and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. He has been invited to give talks about this work at the Rothermere Center for American Studies at the University of Oxford, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Washington Area Early American Seminar, and Boston Area Early American History Seminar. His publications include “Bloody Minds and Peoples Undone: Emotion, Family, and Political Order in the Susquehannock-Virginia War,” William and Mary Quarterly 74 (2017) and “Indigenous Subjecthood and White Populism in British America,” in Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2022).

Public Responses to Democratic Erosion in the United States, Mexico, and Turkey

Project Abstract
The concept of “democratic erosion” has come to the fore in recent years, as leaders around the world have come to office by winning free and fair elections and, once in office, weaken democratic institutions, such as the press, courts, and election-administration bodies.These aspiring autocrats also benefit when they disparage their political systems. By making people believe that democracy is neither strong nor helpful for the general public, then it’s easier for them to, say, claim that elections are rigged even when they are not. But when aspiring autocrats trash-talk their democracies, how do we know that they succeed? Using CISSR funding, I will conduct survey research in three countries – the United States, Turkey, and Mexico – aimed at learning more about the effects of aspiring autocrats’ rhetoric on public opinion.

The surveys will gather information to help answer several questions. First, does the rhetoric of leaders shape people’s perceptions of levels of corruption or party capture of the public sphere? Further, how do these effects differ among supporters and opponents of the aspiring autocrats’ party? The surveys will also explore partisanship as a dependent variable. Do extreme statements about the perfidy of one’s opponents and competing parties make people measurably more partisan? Finally, anger and moral outrage are not the only way to involve people in politics. Enthusiasm has been shown to be another powerful emotion. As an alternative to trash-talking democracy, it will be important to study such messages:  whether they work, which ones, to what extent, and among what types of voters.

Biography
Susan Stokes’ professional career as a political scientist has been dedicated to understanding and promoting democracy. Her work broadly focuses on how democracy emerges as a system of government, when it does/doesn’t work, and how it is undermined. Throughout her academic career, Stokes has focused on a wide variety of topics related to democracy, such as why democratically elected leaders turn their backs on campaign promises, why political parties use bribery to gain votes, and why individuals participate in elections and protests. Shortly after the 2016 election in the United States, Stokes joined with three other political scientists to found Bright Line Watch, which is designed to monitor U.S. democratic practices and institutions and anticipate potential threats to them.

Stokes is also the faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy, based at the University of Chicago. The mission of the center is to use the power of academic research and discussion to support democracy worldwide.

Policing Citizenship: Roadblocks and the Making of the State in Zimbabwe  

Project Overview 
Following an intensification of policing in Zimbabwe since 2012, Zimbabwean police have often been accused not only of seeking bribes form motorists but of valuing money over empathy (Herald 2016). This project conducts an in-depth analysis of policing encounters along Zimbabwe’s roads, to better understand the ways expectations of a particular form of moral personhood among police reshapes conceptions of citizenship. Taking police officers as the most visible instantiations of the state in contemporary Zimbabwe, it studies the ways ideas around citizenship are negotiated in encounters with the police. It takes an ethnographic approach, centered on the semiotic, affective, and lived experiences of policing, in a context in which ordinary residents have been heavily policed since 2012. It grounds this in-depth study of contemporary life in historical analysis which draws on archival material, on the institutional and ideological histories of policing in Zimbabwe and its colonial precursor, Southern Rhodesia. Asking what it means for police to be seen as lacking hunhu, the study examines the ways Zimbabweans’ experiences of and expectations around policing bring together indigenous philosophies of moral conduct and the overlaying of postcolonial aspirations on a historically colonial form. 

Biography
Kathryn Takabvirwa is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Her research centers on policing and citizenship in Zimbabwe, as well as on migration, governance, and the state in Southern Africa. She is interested in the ways people reconcile themselves to the idea of the state and of citizenship in light of histories of state violence. Her work takes up questions of postcoloniality. She is working on a book manuscript on policing in Zimbabwe. Before her work on policing, she conducted research on xenophobia and local governance with scholars at the African Center for Migration and Society, in Johannesburg. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, her MA in Forced Migration Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, and her BA from Yale University.  

A View from the Oval Office: Insights from the President’s Daily Brief 1961-1977

Project Overview
National intelligence agencies collect, analyze, and simplify an ocean of information about the outside world for busy leaders. Many studies abstract away from internal processes or focus on individual leaders; this project puts the spotlight on the interpretive function that intelligence bureaucracies of modern states play. To assess how intelligence mediates between events and leader perceptions, the President’s Daily Brief Project systematical codes and analyzes a unique corpus of top secret – but now declassified – daily intelligence summaries given to the head of state and top advisors. Released in 2015, this corpus President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) cover four US presidents, seventeen years, and many of the most important events of the Cold War. The project seeks to identify how the U.S. intelligence community simplified, prioritized, and tailored the content of the PDB for each president by, for example, tracking changes in the PDB’s length, regional focus and graphical content. As a CISSR faculty fellow, I will advance the PDB Project from a pilot data collection effort to a full-fledged research agenda. Project activities includes support for graduate research assistance, funds for collaboration with external faculty, archival visits, and a unique event on the UChicago campus on the use of redactions as a tool for social science inferences.  

Biography
Austin Carson’s President's Daily Brief (PDB) Project is systematically coding and analyzing a unique corpus of top secret --but now declassified --daily intelligence summaries delivered to four US presidents over seventeen years. The project will also provide a new, systematic way of measuring secrecy trends in international relations. His research and the PDB Project will produce several datasets and provide a critical resource for scholars interested in a broad range of topics relating to foreign policy and leadership in international relations.

Skin Color Inequality in Mexico: A Sibling Fixed Effects Approach

Project Overview
Within the last five years, researchers have uncovered vast evidence of significant skin-color-based inequalities in Mexico. Light skinned Mexicans have more education, higher incomes, better health, and better jobs than their dark skinned counterparts. These findings have challenged Mexico’s national ideology of Mestizaje, which downplayed the significance of race within the Mexican population. However, it is still not clear what factors are producing these inequalities. Prominent voices in Mexico have argued that these gaps are caused by discrimination by employers or teachers on the basis of color. Others have argued that these gaps may stem from discrimination that took place during Mexico’s colonial era. However, individual differences in family class background may account for some of the color-based gaps. We will design our own survey instrument and adopt a sibling fixed effects approach to illuminate the social mechanisms that produce these color-based inequalities in contemporary Mexico. This approach powerfully accounts for family-level differences by removing the effect of observed and unobserved factors that might influence the socioeconomic outcomes of interest and are shared by the very fact of belonging to the same family. This research will contribute to our theoretical understanding of racial boundaries by assessing the impact of race in a setting outside of the U.S. 

Biography
René D. Flores is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. 

Flores’ research interests are in the fields of international migration, race and ethnicity, and social stratification. His research explores the emergence of social boundaries around immigrants and racial minorities across the world as well as how these boundaries contribute to the reproduction of ethnic-based social inequality. 

His work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Social Problems, among others. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Sociological Association, the Paul Merage Foundation, and others. His research has been reported by BBC, NPR, USA Today, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post, among others.

Flores received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2014.

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René D. Flores[1] and Ana Canedo[2]
[1]Neubauer Family Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, University of Chicago.
[2]Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin.

Enduring Immigrant “Illegality” in Mexico:  Waiting, Aging, and the State

Project Overview
This study will examine the wide-ranging effects of long-term separation on aging parents left behind in Mexico by their adult children who have permanently settled without authorized immigration status in the United States. Undocumented Mexican immigrants who leave the US face great risk and potential death if they attempt re-cross the southern border clandestinely, often making travel to visit or even to say good-bye to aging or dying parents prohibitive. While remittances sent by migrant offspring can improve material circumstances for parents left behind, the out-migration of children contributes to the loss of emotional and instrumental supports. These immigrant families thus grapple with a crisis that ripples across both countries: The elderly parents of undocumented Mexicans in the United States are aging and dying alone in Mexico, while their children remain stuck on the other side of the border. My project will analyze how the parents of undocumented Mexican immigrants practically deal with the constraints of legal status, family separation, and waiting as they navigate their relationship with the state—the very entity responsible for constructing immigration status and for supporting the elderly via social care systems.

Biography
Angela S. García is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Her research centers on international migration, law and society, social policy, and well-being. García’s book, Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law (University of California Press 2019) compares the effects of restrictive and accommodating state and local-level immigration laws on the everyday lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the US. Her current book project theorizes time and waiting from the perspective of undocumented immigrants who would have been eligible for Deferred Action for the Parents of Americans (DAPA) and their aging parents left behind in communities of origin across Mexico. She is also developing a collaborative project on Chicago’s municipal ID program, the first to unfold under the Trump administration. García received her PhD in Sociology and her master’s in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego.

Groundwork for a Sociology of Corruption

Project Overview
We propose to hold the first-ever symposium on sociological approaches to the study of corruption.  While corruption has risen to the top of the scholarly agenda in other social sciences, sociology has remained surprisingly silent in spite of its ideal intellectual equipment to understand corruption as fundamentally embedded in social structures.  We aim to end this silence by assembling a group of mid- and early-career scholars--led by ourselves and stimulated by keynotes from eminent figures--to articulate an agenda for the sociology of corruption and define the framing debates in this nascent field.  We will recruit this group both by directly inviting scholars working in and around the sociology of corruption and also by issuing an open call for paper proposals to identify promising scholars outside our intellectual networks.  We will meet for a two-day symposium at the University of Chicago in Fall 2020, and expect three main products to result: first, an ongoing intellectual dialogue among a core group of scholars working on the sociology of corruption; second, a special journal issue focused on a high-impact statement of what the field is now and has the potential to become; and third, an edited book volume showcasing a wider variety of scholarship presented at the symposium.

Biography
Marco Garrido is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He recently published a book entitled The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila (University of Chicago Press).

Desert Paradise: The Petra Terraces Archaeology

Project Overview
The ancient city of Petra in Jordan is rightly known for its spectacular funerary architecture and long-distance trade connections. But its inhabitants’ capacity to live in extreme environments was just as important for the city’s success. The Petra Terraces Archaeological Project, a collaboration between the University of Chicago and Brown University, assembles an international team of archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, and architects to investigate the history of the human-landscape interactions that facilitated agriculture around Petra over the past few millennia. By studying the construction, use, repair, and collapse of ancient agricultural and hydrological terracing systems in a single watershed north of the city, the Project aims to produce a detailed, diachronic analysis of how people in the past shaped the local environment by controlling—and at times also failing to control—flows of water and sediment along that watershed. It implements innovative and interdisciplinary methods and brings new comparative and anthropological questions to study long-term changes in rural landscapes that are essential to understanding the history of human occupation of southern Jordan and, in fact, the development of the city of Petra itself.

Biography
Sarah Newman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and in the College. Newman’s archaeological research asks fundamental questions about how humans have interacted with, impacted, and been influenced by their environments.

Newman’s current fieldwork projects apply multidisciplinary approaches to long-term uses and reuses of landscapes in Guatemala and in Jordan. The cross-cultural (and cross-environmental) comparisons between those distinct regions provide a testing ground to develop and refine methodologies for documenting, dating, and analyzing ancient agricultural and hydrological terracing, as well as an opportunity to explore how anthropogenic landscape modifications—some still in use by modern farmers—endure across environmental change, collapse, and abandonment.

Her current book project, Before Trash: A History of Waste in Mesoamerica, examines the changing nature of rubbish from Pre-Columbian times through the twentieth century. Before Trash explores how objects that have long been categorized as ancient garbage—broken pots, bone fragments, crafting debris—held different meanings in the past than they do today. The book reveals that the idea of “waste” is not a self-evident or universal concept, challenging archaeologists to reconsider one of the most basic assumptions of the discipline: the idea that most of what we study is trash people left behind.

Newman also specializes in the analysis of archaeological animal remains. She probes the ecological, historical, economic, and symbolic meanings of animals in Mesoamerica by examining dietary, hunting, and game management practices and their ecological impacts.

Becoming Urban: Understanding the Urban Transformation of Migrants to Phnom Penh

Project Description
Our project undertakes to study the process of “late late urbanization” in Phnom Penh and, specifically, to revisit the question of becoming urban in the twenty-first century. We will focus not just on urban change but on the rural changes driving urbanization. We will focus particularly on the environmental factors driving people to migrate, including climate change, agro-industrial development, deforestation, and dam construction. We will study how rural migrants make their place in the city by investigating how they use and navigate urban space and the distinctly urban relations they form. Ultimately, we aim to produce a deeper understanding of the lived experience of migrants and a better account of their transformation from villagers to urbanites. To achieve these ends, we plan to employ two kinds of ethnographic research, traditional ethnography to observe migrants as they avail of services, organize and form community, deal with local leaders, and engage in urban politics; and distributed ethnography, through the collection of many micro-narratives from migrants in an effort to develop what may be described as narrative-based landscapes. 

Biography
Dr. Sabina Shaikh is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies and Urban Studies in the College, Committee on Geographical Sciences in the Social Sciences Division, and the Harris School of Public Policy; Director of the Program on the Global Environment; and Faculty Director of the Chicago Studies Program  at the University of Chicago.  As an environmental economist, her research and teaching focuses on the economics of environmental policy and natural resource management, the valuation of ecosystem services and global sustainable development. Her collaborative research on water sustainability, migration and urbanization in the Mekong Basin of Cambodia has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Center for International Social Science Research, the Social Science Research Center, and the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago. She also serves at the co-lead of the Environmental Frontiers Initiative in the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Wisconsin and a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis.

Marco Garrido, Sabina Shaikh and Anni Beukes

Why Citizens Support Elected Leaders that Erode Democracy?

Project Overview
Why do many voters in contemporary democracies support what seem to be openly anti-democratic actions by elected incumbents? Why do some voters choose to simply ignore these actions? And why does public opposition coalesce into protests and social movements in some democracies that are eroding and not in others? This project will address these questions by using a series of survey experiments to examine the behavioral underpinnings of citizen support for democracy as well as support for anti-democratic actions that can be taken by democratically elected political incumbents. This project examines heterogeneity and malleability in citizen views regarding what constitute the core principles of democracy, as well as coordination problems around opposing sequential but small-scale anti-democratic activities. It envisions fielding a series of survey experiments in six countries from around the globe that suffer differing degrees of democratic erosion but that can be paired in three groups along core factors that are hypothesized to impact citizen norms and beliefs about democracy such as democratic age and the nature of the former authoritarian regime. This novel research design holds promise to speak to how scholars and practitioners should understand the snowballing trend in democratic erosion around the world.

Biography
Michael Albertus is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes, inequality and redistribution, clientelism, and civil conflict. He has published two books, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (2015, Cambridge University Press) and Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy (2018, Cambridge University Press), and a host of articles in outlets such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Comparative Political Studies. He also writes regularly for public audiences in outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs.

Cross-National Negotiation: The Role of Language Format Choice

Project Overview
Cross-national negotiation typically involves parties who speak different languages. This is true for multinational corporations such as Apple and international organizations such as the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the World Trade Organization. Such negotiation circumstances frequently require the parties to communicate either directly in a lingua franca, typically English, or indirectly in one’s native tongue through interpreters. In this research project we investigate how different communication formats impact the process and outcome of cross-national negotiation. In order to test this, we will simulate a negotiation process by recruiting negotiation dyads in the Netherlands made up of native speakers of Dutch and native speakers of German, both of whom speak English as a foreign language. The negotiation will either take place in English as lingua franca or in their native language through interpreters. We will evaluate how the communication format affects the negotiation process, such as the extent to which negotiators are cooperative, find integrative solutions and so on, as well as its impact on the final negotiation outcomes. This research will broaden our theoretical understanding of how using language influences thought and action in a real-world context of cross-national negotiation. It also will have important implications for individuals and organizations that routinely choose what communication format to use when they negotiate.

Biography
Boaz Keysar is the William Benton Professor in Psychology and the College and the Chair of the Cognition program. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1991.

Keysar’s researches the relationship between decision-making and communication. He publishes in major journals such as Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Cognition, and Cognitive Psychology. His research has also received substantial interest in media outlets such as Scientific American, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, Der Spiegel, China Daily, Smart Money – Russia, MSNBC, NPR, and Freakonomics. 

Professor Keysar is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science, as well as a member of several professional associations such as the Psychonomic Society and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. He also serves on editorial boards and grant reviews.

Keysar's honors include a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship. He received grants from the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation. He was awarded the President's Service award by President Clinton for his non-profit work.

Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab

Project Overview
Transitional Justice, that is the act of reckoning with a former authoritarian regime after it has ceased to exist, has direct implications for democratic processes. It influences who decides to go into politics, shapes politicians' behavior while in office, and, finally, influences how they delegate policy decisions. That is why mechanisms of transitional justice far from being the epilogue of an outgoing authoritarian regime are a constitutive part of the new democratic order. How successful these democracies become at staying democracies and their overall quality is a direct consequence of transitional justice. This book distinguishes within transitional justice between transparency mechanisms ---the revelation of authoritarian legacies that were concealed---and purges---the firing of open collaborators of the ancien r\'egime. This distinction throws into stark relief the contrasting effects they have on sustaining and shaping the quality of democratic processes. While transparency regimes unequivocally reduce corruption and improve the programmatic representation political parties can offer, the effect of purges is more ambiguous and contingent on features of the former authoritarian regime as well as current circumstances. At the same time, not all new states are equally well-positioned to carry out purges in the first place. Hence the availability of transitional justice as remedy is not uniformly available. A highly disaggregated global transitional justice dataset allows readers to evaluate these theoretical claims and underscores that the choice between  democracy and justice that scholars have for decades presented newly transitioned societies with is misconstrued.

Biography
Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Studies in Logic and Rhetoric, and Decyzje. Read more about Monika here. Check out her Google Scholar page here. You can contact Professor Nalepaat mnalepa@uchicago.edu.

Writing Colonial History at the Ends of Empire 

Project Description
This project examines the political context in twentieth-century African independence movements--in this case Senegal--for the writing of colonial history. It takes a basically biographical approach to this subject, by examining the career of Gabriel Debien (1906-1990), a French scholar who generally considered the founder of the social history of the French Antilles. Debien began his career teaching at the University of Cairo, but was hired to establish the department of history at the University of Dakar in 1957, just as Senegal was making the transition to its ultimate independence from France, which it achieved in 1960.

There is a well-established link between the between colonial independence movements and the writing of the history of slavery and abolitionism. Eric Williams, who eventually became the first prime minister of the independent Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, wroteCapitalism and Slavery (1944) after studying in Oxford. In France, leaders of the négritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor (future first president of Senegal) and Aimé Césaire (Martiniquan politician) both gave lectures at the Sorbonne about the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher in April of 1948 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of abolition in the French Empire.

Debien testifies to a reverse movement: instead of a colonial subject studying and writing about slavery and abolition in the metropole, he was was born and educated in western France and then spent most of his scholarly career outside of Europe. The establishment of the discipline of history in Senegal was concurrent with debates over the form that autonomy for France’s overseas possessions would take. Senghor and Césaire both eschewed complete independence for the former colonies, opting--successfully, in the case of Aimé Césaire's Martinique--for a continuing political integration with the metropole. Although this was not to be the case for Senegal, Senghor advocated for a Eurafrican federalism based upon bidirectional cultural influences. These ideas left their traces on establishment of higher education in independent Senegal--a project to which Gabriel Debien was called to contribute. 

Biography
Paul Cheney’s scholarly work focuses principally old regime France and its colonial empire. Before taking his doctorate at Columbia University, Cheney studied economics at the New School for Social Research, which probably helps to explain his ongoing interest in the world economy of the long eighteenth century. Cheney’s latest book “Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue” (Chicago, 2017), is a global micro history of France's plantation complex from its apogee in the late eighteenth century through its decline. His first book, “Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy” (Harvard, 2010) is an intellectual history of the political and economic implications of globalization in eighteenth-century France. Professor Cheney teaches across all of these subjects in European and more broadly Atlantic history. Cheney has a special enthusiasm for teaching the history of political thought to Chicago undergraduates.  Paul began his career as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, and taught in Berlin, Belfast, Shanghai, New York and Paris.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences in the College; Lecturer in Law

PhD, Harvard University, 2012; JD, Yale Law School, 2009

Darryl Li is an anthropologist and attorney working at the intersection of war, law, migration, empire, and race with a focus on transregional linkages between the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans.

Li's forthcoming book from Stanford University Press develops an ethnographic approach to the comparative study of universalism using the example of transnational "jihadists" -- specifically, Arabs and other foreigners who fought in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia Herzegovina. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in Bosnia and a half-dozen other countries, the monograph situates transnational jihads in relation to more powerful universalisms, including socialist Non-Alignment, United Nations peacekeeping, and the U.S.-led "Global War on Terror." He is at work on a second project on migrant military labor (frequently called "mercenaries" or "military contractors") across the Indian Ocean.

Li has participated in litigation arising from the "War on Terror" as party counsel, amicus, or expert witness, including in Guantánamo habeas, Alien Tort, material support, denaturalization, immigration detention, and asylum proceedings. He is a member of the New York and Illinois bars.

We, Mercenaries: Migrants and Militaries across the Indian Ocean

The oil-rich countries states that are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council - have long relied on migrant workers from the east and south to work as construction laborers, domestic caretakers, service workers, and all other manner of professionals. Darryl Li is exploring the importance of the less well-known trans-regional migrants who comprise much of the security architecture of the region, as well as the economic, political, and moral questions that arise when foreign military workers may rival that of resident citizen-soldiers.

The Day after Tomorrow: Waiting for the Future in Contemporary Rwanda 

Based on ethnographic research in Rwanda, this project is interested in the increasingly hegemonic language of thinking end-of-war social milieux in terms of transition. The logic of justice as transition, the proponents of this model argue, is to focus on bringing the belligerents together and to forge ahead together in unity, as opposed to taking the vengeance route. In this transitional form, the courts are imagined as the main loci for reparation but as cathartic spaces as well. They repair the injured and release us all from collective violence by reprimanding the acts, forgiving them, remembering them.

This project will examine this entanglement of private affects with large political processes inherited from a global language of remembrance as a preventive measure. How do individuals negotiate this intimacy with state practices? What is it that the law promises or perhaps conjures up? Understandably, given its recent and current history, this region of the world is predominantly known for political violence. Often omitted in this conversation however, are how individuals navigate their difficult social circumstances and still manage to live complicated but nonetheless politically engaged lives. My hope is that with this project, we as scholars can begin to understand how one lives in a world in which political violence has been normalized and yet remains so spectacular.

Biography
Natacha Nsabimana is Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the College and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She received her doctorate from Columbia University in 2017.

Broadly construed, Natacha Nsabimana’s research and teaching interests include law and subjectivity, postcolonial critique, musical movements and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and the diaspora.

Domestic Politics and Indian Foreign Security Policy 

India is a rising power: its rapidly growing economy, large military, and pivotal strategic location have made it a far more important international player than in decades past. Yet it is also a highly competitive democracy that faces serious poverty and numerous demands on government resources. This nascent book project explores the relationship between these domesitc politics and India's foreign security policy. It investigates Indian public opinion toward foreign affairs, gathers extensive new quantitative data on when and how parties, politicians, and political movements have mobilized around foreign policy, and uses detailed case studies of specific crises and policy decisions to explore how policymakers understood their domestic incentives and constraints.

Biography
Paul Staniland is Associate Professor of Political Science and faculty chair of the Committee on International Relations. He is the author of the award-winning book Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Cornell 2014), as well as a number of peer-reviewed articles on civil war and international security. Staniland's regional focus is South Asia, and he has done field research in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, and Singapore. He is currently working on a book on relations between governments and armed groups in post-colonial South Asia.

Land Reform and Long-Term Development 

As a CISSR faculty fellow from 2016-18, this project builds in key ways from my ongoing work. My focus the last two years has mainly been on (i) developing theory linking land reform, development, and conflict;(ii) analyzing the case of Peru; (iii) gathering original data for a broader comparative project that engages with the experience of southern Europe. It builds in important ways from my work last year and this year on Peru. The main cases I am studying now are in southern Europe: Italy, Portugal, Spain.  All of these countries had wide-ranging land reform programs between the 1930s and 1970s.

Numerous scholars have long hypothesized that reforming rural relationships and economic organization holds the potential to unleash human capital development and economic dynamism and reduce contestation over the lopsided distribution of property. This project will investigate these relationships empirically for the first time in southern Europe, using original data on property-level transfers that I have collected over the past year and a half in part using CISSR funding.

Biography
Michael Albertus is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes and redistribution, regime transitions and stability, politics under dictatorship, clientelism, and civil conflict.

His first book, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series. It won the 2016 Luebbert Book Award for the best book in comparative politics published in the previous two years, as well as the 2017 LASA Bryce Wood Book Award for the best book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities. His research has also been published in the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Economics & Politics, World Development, and Latin American Research Review.

His second book, Flawed Since Conception: Authoritarian Legacies Under Democracy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Inside Out: How Prison Gangs Organize Crime and Threaten the State from Behind Bars

This book project explores a paradox of mass-incarceration societies: Prison, the state’s main tool for punishing crime, has become a headquarters for organizing crime, with dire consequences. For example, in May 2006, São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) prison gang launched hundreds of terror attacks on the streets and simultaneous rebellions in 90 prisons, holding the city hostage and forcing significant government concessions. Paradoxically, the same gang imposed a homicide ban in slums that cut homicide rates by 75%. Since then, PCC-type gangs have spread throughout Brazil, and Central America’s prison-based gangs have also produced extreme peaks and troughs of violence. What are the consequences when states depend on criminal organizations to govern sprawling prison systems and underserved peripheries?

My CISSR project exploits the spread of sophisticated prison gangs to every state in Brazil, analyzing real-time changes in street-level crime, violence, and governance. As a 2018 CISSR Fellow, I established connections with Brazilian scholars whose graduate advisees are developing ethnographic research sites in different communities. In eight slums across two states, I piloted a novel “replicated ethnographic observation” methodology: each researcher completes a standardized report for their site, characterizing local prison-gang governance and the processes of gang takeover. As a returning fellow, I will replicate this methodology in 4-6 additional states. This project will produce the first systematic data on prison-based criminal governance in slum areas; strengthen an international network of gang and slum researchers; and provide a model for cross-disciplinary research into sensitive issues like gang governance.

Biography
Benjamin Lessing, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, studies "criminal conflict"—organized violence involving armed groups that do not seek formal state power, such as drug cartels, prison gangs, and paramilitaries. His first book, Making Peace In Drug Wars (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2017), examines armed conflict between drug cartels and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Currently, he is conducting field research in Brazil for a second book, tentatively titled Inside Out: How Prison Gangs Organize Crime (And Threaten the State) From Behind Bars. Lessing has also founded the Criminal Governance in the Americas project, which is measuring the extent and intensity of gang rule over civilian populations throughout Latin America, and is co-director of the Project on Political Violence at Chicago. Lessing has also studied gang-state negotiations and armed electioneering by paramilitary groups.  Prior to his doctoral work at UC Berkeley, Lessing lived in Rio de Janeiro for five years, first as a Fulbright scholar, later conducting field research on arms trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean for non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO. Lessing attended Kenyon College, and was born in Rochester, Michigan in 1973.

Autocratic Regime Institutionalization: A Global Dataset

Despite the increasing prominence of studies focusing on authoritarian institutions, accurate measures of autocratic regime institutionalization have yet to be developed, leaving researchers to depend on poor proxies for real institutional strength. In this ongoing project, Monika Nalepa and collaborators hope to fill in this missing data gap by developing a global dataset of autocratic regime institutionalization in which each country-year combination from 1960 to 2015 is scored across various dimensions of institutionalization.

Biography
Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Decyzje. Her next book manuscript, Parties Ascendant, examines the development of programmatic parties in new democracies with a special focus on legislative institutions.

Politics of the Past & Material Expressions of Frenchness in the Municipio of San Rafael, Veracruz, Mexico

The proposed fieldwork is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary investigation of the material dimensions of the French colonial presence in the municipio of San Rafael, Veracruz, Mexico, and its legacies in the present. Through the combined lens of archaeology, history, ethnography, and heritage studies, it questions assumptions surrounding the history of French migrants in the region and their integration into the political-cultural space of Mexico. Of particular concern is the way in which ‘Frenchness’ has been ‘exceptionalized’ in the past, and deployed in the present to justify forms of discrimination and political domination by the descendants of French families, especially toward people of indigenous descent. My hypothesis is that these narratives camouflage a complex history, which can critically inform political debates in the present. I also contend that the material world – the domain of architecture, space, and objects – holds acute pertinence about how Frenchness has been constructed and misused in San Rafael.

One key objective is that this fieldwork, and the broader project, will spark critical reflections about regional history. Another is that they will articulate with current conversations about multiculturalism in France, by offering empirical evidence of the plasticity of French identity, as a time when reactionary forces want to reclaim ‘Frenchness’ as an immutable essence endangered by cultural diversity.

Biography
François G. Richard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and in the College, who joined the UofC in 2007. He is a historical anthropologist and historical archaeologist, with primary interests in questions of French imperialism, colonial power, materiality, political landscapes, and peasant societies, in West Africa and Latin America. His original research focused on the political experiences of rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal, as the region was reshaped by processes of state-making, the Atlantic economy, and colonial capitalism. This early work has been the object of a number of articles and book chapters, two edited volumes (Ethnic Ambiguity in the African Past, Materializing Colonial Encounters), and a forthcoming book (Spring 2018) titled Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal. His current interests continue to lie in the relationships between peasantries and colonialism, but in a broader geography of French imperialism and political identity. His new project examines the material histories of French farmers in Mexico, focusing on the communities of Jicaltepec and San Rafael in the state of Veracruz, and their legacies in the present. My broader objective is to study 1) the historical construction of French identities at the periphery of empire (e.g. how ‘being French’ was felt and imagined outside of metropolitan France), 2) the politics of Frenchness in contemporary Mexico, and 3) the role that objects, architectures, and landscapes have played in the making of different histories of Frenchness – and what lessons they bring to conversations about identity and nation in today’s France.

The Relationship Between Licit and Illicit Global Capital Flows: Ethnography, Economy, and Law

In Playing in the Gray: Foreign Investment in Frontier Markets, Kimberly Kay Hoang traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands to holding companies in Singapore or Hong Kong and finally to investments in places like Vietnam and Myanmar. The planned book looks at how investors capitalize on frontier markets -- where rule of law is absent, regulations can quickly change, government intervention is high, and corruption is rife to explain why and how investors ‘play in the gray.’

Biography
Research on global markets tends to center on either formal markets or shadow economies. Few scholars look at the intertwining relationship between licit and illicit activity in markets. Economists typically cover the realm of the formal economy by using statistics, modeling, and simulation of financial flows, which are devoid of real-life market actors, while humanistic and sociological approaches tend to focus on illicit trades through ethnographies of money laundering, criminal networks, sex work, or shadow banking. Both approaches produce valid insights, but neither approach holistically addresses the question of how illicit activities (i.e. bribery, corruption) necessitate the flow of global capital into formal economies around the world. Emerging markets, which are highly unregulated and subject to corruption, enable us to theorize the intersection between legal vs. illegal activity in markets. These are places where people, politicians, and scholars know that formal and informal economies overlap, yet few have examined how they overlap.

With the CISSR grant, I will bridge theoretical concepts and methodological tools across the humanities, economics, and law to develop a better understanding of global capital flows as driven by specific agents, political elites, and institutional actors. During this fellowship, I am affiliating with the American Bar Foundation and engaging with new literatures to theorize how global laws around corruption, transparency, and taxation structure investment vehicles to manage investor risk across the competing legal jurisdictions of multiple countries. Anticipated outcomes include my second book, Playing in the Gray: Foreign Investments in Frontier Markets, and new collaborative projects that facilitate dialogue among scholars across the humanities, economics, business, and law to interrogate the intersection between licit and illicit activity in other economies.

Kimberly Hoang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and in 2012 she won the American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award. 

Dr. Hoang is the author of, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work(2015) published by the University of California Press. This monograph examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam's informal economy. Dealing in Desire is the winner of seven distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Association for Asian Studies.

With funding support from the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Global Scholar Award, she is currently conducting research for her second book project, Capital Brokers in Emerging Markets. This second book involves a comparative study of the articulation of inter-Asian flows of capital and foreign investment in Southeast Asia.

Her work has been published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, City & Community, Contexts, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her peer reviewed journal articles have won over 10 prizes from the Sociologists for Women in Society, Vietnam Scholars Group, and the American Sociological Association: Section on Global & Transnational Sociology, Section on Race, Gender and Class, Section on Sociology of Sex & Gender, Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment, Section on Asia and Asian America, and the Section on Sexualities.

Inside Out: Prison Gangs’ Criminal Governance as a Threat to State Authority

From El Salvador to Chicago, prison gangs have learned to project power beyond prison walls in ways that pose a serious challenge to state authority and that call into question mass incarceration policies. Benjamin Lessing will visit multiple field sites in Brazil to witness the ongoing expansion of sophisticated Brazilian prison gangs and document the impact gang governance has on local residents.

In 2006, a prison gang held the world’s third-largest city hostage. São Paulo’s Primeiro Comando da Capital launched simultaneous rebellions in 90 prisons and hundreds of synchronized terror attacks on the streets, bringing the city to a standstill and forcing significant concessions from officials. Paradoxically, the same gang imposed a ban on unauthorized homicides throughout the urban periphery, producing a drastic decline in violence. Though extreme, the case is not exceptional. From El Salvador to Chicago, prison gangs have learned to project power beyond prison walls, organizing street-level crime, altering patterns of violence, and using that control as a bargaining chip with states. What happens when prisons—the core of the state’s coercive apparatus—become headquarters for criminal organizations? What are the policy implications when prison gangs come to govern marginalized populations more effectively than weak or absent states ever did?

I propose a systematic assessment of the degree, variation, and impact of prison-based criminal governance on peripheral communities and the illicit markets they house. Through field visits to six Brazilian states, focus groups and interviews with residents, and training of local collaborators for ongoing research, I will produce novel observations of criminal governance across varied contexts. This will help answer critical questions: When and how did prison gangs establish control? What areas of daily life do they impinge on? How do residents feel about gang governance? What are the consequences for states that come to depend on gangs to govern not only sprawling prison systems but under-served and violent urban peripheries?

Biography
Benjamin Lessing, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago, studies "criminal conflict"—organized violence involving armed groups that do not seek formal state power, such as drug cartels, prison gangs, and paramilitaries.His first book, Making Peace In Drug Wars(Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2017), examines armed conflict between drug cartels and the state in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. Currently, he is conducting field research for a second book, tentatively titled Inside Out: How Prison Gangs Organize Crime (And Threaten the State) From Behind Bars. It explores the counterproductive effects of mass-incarceration policies, which inadvertently strengthen armed criminal groups at the core of the state's coercive apparatus. He has also studied gang-state negotiations and armed electioneering by paramilitary groups.  Prior to his doctoral work at UC Berkeley, Lessing lived in Rio de Janeiro for five years, first as a Fulbright scholar, later conducting field research on arms trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean for non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Viva Rio, Brazil’s largest NGO. Lessing attended Kenyon College, and was born in Rochester, Michigan in 1973.

Transitional Justice and the Quality of Democratic Representation

When authoritarian regimes known for systematic human rights violations transition to democracies, citizens and politicians in the new regimes reckon with those violations in different ways. Using original data on every truth commission, act of lustration, and purge of former authoritarian elites since 1946, Monika Nalepa has developed stronger measures of transitional justice strategies than are currently available to assess the effects of these different strategies on the quality of democratic representation.

How do former authoritarian elites utilize the secret information acquired by the former enforcement apparatus associated with their respective regimes? I seek to learn whether such information can be used to blackmail politicians to make policy concessions, or whether previously undisclosed information about human rights abuses can jeopardize a new democracy's chances of survival. This line of research marks a new direction in comparative politics that examines the relationship between transitional justice (TJ) and the quality of democratic representation. It focuses on policies aimed at vetting political candidates for acts of collaboration with the authoritarian regime, and possible human rights violations committed in the past. This process is known as lustration. Revealing evidence of past authoritarian wrongs may prevent former authoritarian elites from influencing policy in new democracies. In preliminary work, I show that former authoritarian elites' influence tends to decrease with severity of transitional justice, but increases as voters view politicians' involvement with the former authoritarian regime as an important issue. The work also suggests that the effectiveness of TJ policies is reduced in the absence of a free press, as the media's inability to uncover empty threats which allows former autocrats to extract policy concessions. Surprisingly, the magnitude of ideological differences between current politicians and successors of authoritarian elites has no bearing on the ability of former autocrats to extract such concessions. This research will work to develop stronger measures of TJ severity to help evaluate how transitional justice can contribute to stable democratic transitions.

Biography
Monika Nalepa (PhD, Columbia University) is associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago. With a focus on post-communist Europe, her research interests include transitional justice, parties and legislatures, and game-theoretic approaches to comparative politics. Her first book, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics Series and received the Best Book award from the Comparative Democratization section of the APSA and the Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. She has published her research in the Journal of Comparative Politics, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Decyzje. Her next book manuscript, Parties Ascendant, examines the development of programmatic parties in new democracies with a special focus on legislative institutions. 

Politics of the Past & Material Expressions of Frenchness in the Municipio of San Rafael, Veracruz, Mexico

What does it mean to be French? As many ponder this question in contemporary France, Francois Richard is embarking on an ambitious study of the objects, architectures, and landscapes created by communities of French farmers that settled in the coastal Mexican state of Veracruz during the 1800s, uncovering valuable lessons about French identity, nation, and multiculturalism in the process.

The proposed fieldwork is part of a multi-year, interdisciplinary investigation of the material dimensions of the French colonial presence in the municipio of San Rafael, Veracruz, Mexico, and its legacies in the present. Through the combined lens of archaeology, history, ethnography, and heritage studies, it questions assumptions surrounding the history of French migrants in the region and their integration into the political-cultural space of Mexico. Of particular concern is the way in which ‘Frenchness’ has been ‘exceptionalized’ in the past, and deployed in the present to justify forms of discrimination and political domination by the descendants of French families, especially toward people of indigenous descent. My hypothesis is that these narratives camouflage a complex history, which can critically inform political debates in the present. I also contend that the material world – the domain of architecture, space, and objects – holds acute pertinence about how Frenchness has been constructed and misused in San Rafael.

One key objective is that this fieldwork, and the broader project, will spark critical reflections about regional history. Another is that they will articulate with current conversations about multiculturalism in France, by offering empirical evidence of the plasticity of French identity, as a time when reactionary forces want to reclaim ‘Frenchness’ as an immutable essence endangered by cultural diversity.

Biography
François G. Richard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and in the College, who joined the UofC in 2007. He is a historical anthropologist and historical archaeologist, with primary interests in questions of French imperialism, colonial power, materiality, political landscapes, and peasant societies, in West Africa and Latin America. His original research focused on the political experiences of rural communities in the Siin province of Senegal, as the region was reshaped by processes of state-making, the Atlantic economy, and colonial capitalism. This early work has been the object of a number of articles and book chapters, two edited volumes (Ethnic Ambiguity in the African Past, Materializing Colonial Encounters), and a forthcoming book (Spring 2018) titled Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal. His current interests continue to lie in the relationships between peasantries and colonialism, but in a broader geography of French imperialism and political identity. His new project examines the material histories of French farmers in Mexico, focusing on the communities of Jicaltepec and San Rafael in the state of Veracruz, and their legacies in the present. My broader objective is to study 1) the historical construction of French identities at the periphery of empire (e.g. how ‘being French’ was felt and imagined outside of metropolitan France), 2) the politics of Frenchness in contemporary Mexico, and 3) the role that objects, architectures, and landscapes have played in the making of different histories of Frenchness – and what lessons they bring to conversations about identity and nation in today’s France.

State Formation and Popular Contention

Understanding the process of building state capacity is an essential question in social science, and James Robinson tackles this question by studying the relationship between state and society in Colombia, where the expansion of the road network and the introduction of new constitutional rights has affected the very nature of the country’s political process by changing ways citizens coordinate to make claims on the state.

How does state formation impact society, popular contention and social claims on the state? How do such claims feed back onto the process of state formation? We intend to study these issues using a unique dataset of all popular protests and collective actions in Colombia since 1975 collected by the NGO Centro de Investigacion y Educacion Popular (CINEP). We are particularly interested in comparing the relative impact of the physical expansion of the state and the constitutional introduction of various "rights" in 1991. We hypothesize that both the expansion of the state and the introduction of new rights changed the nature of popular contention, making it less parochial, more coordinated across space, and more focused on national claims and institutions. We also expect that the change in popular contention contributed to the enforcement of the rights introduced with the 1991 Constitution, making the rights more than just words on paper. We also hypothesize that this transformation influenced national policymaking by focusing it more on the provision of public goods that appealed to a broader new constituency than on clientelistic exchange. Thus, the political crisis that induced the 1991 constitutional reforms in the first place precipitated a cumulative process of state formation and social transformation.

Biography
James Robinson is Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and one of only 8 University Professors at the University of Chicago. He is also the inaugural director of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the Harris School of Public Policy. He studied economics at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick and Yale University and before coming to Chicago taught in the Departments of Government, Economics, History and Human and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. His main research interests are in comparative economic and political development with a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is co-author with Daron Acemoglu of the books Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and Why Nations Fail, which has been translated into 35 languages including Arabic, Dari, Farsi and Mongolian. Their next book, The Narrow Path to Liberty, will be published by Penguin in 2018. He is currently conducting research in Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Haiti and in Colombia where he has taught for over 20 years during the summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá.

Land Reform and Long-Term Development

Michael Albertus’ ongoing project examines the implications of land reform for multiple developmental outcomes such as the provision of public education, the political integration of historically marginalized social groups, and civil conflict. The project is one of the most detailed empirical examinations of land reform’s impact on development to date, and preliminary evidence from Peru suggests that land reform’s effects are conditional, depending on the scope and execution of reforms.

This project seeks to examine the long-term implications of land reform for a range of key development outcomes such as the provision of public education, political integration of historically excluded social groups, and civil conflict. The main case I am studying is Peru, though I am expanding the empirical scope to several European cases (Portugal and Italy) that underwent land reform in order to probe the generalizability of the theory and mechanisms. Half of all private agricultural land in Peru was expropriated and redistributed under military rule from 1969-80, mostly to peasants who previously worked on large, semi-feudal estates. Scholars have hypothesized that this reorganization of the countryside is at the heart of a host of consequential subsequent developments in Peru: the rise of rural public schooling, the greater political power of indigenous groups, and even the brutal Shining Path insurgency that ultimately killed roughly 70,000 people between 1980 and 2000. This project will investigate these relationships by geographically linking earlier land reform in Peru with these diverse development outcomes to determine how the scope and character of land reform impacted them.

Biography

Michael Albertus is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes and redistribution, regime transitions and stability, politics under dictatorship, clientelism, and civil conflict.

His first book, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series. It won the 2016 Luebbert Book Award for the best book in comparative politics published in the previous two years, as well as the 2017 LASA Bryce Wood Book Award for the best book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities. His research has also been published in the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Economics & Politics, World Development, and Latin American Research Review. His second book, Flawed Since Conception: Authoritarian Legacies Under Democracy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Using Language to Promote Sustainable Consumption

People are reluctant to use certain products that could mitigate water and food scarcity in the future like recycled wastewater and insect-based food because they are considered disgusting. Building on previous work, Boaz Keysar will evaluate whether presenting such aversive products in a non-native language can nudge people into consuming more of them by reducing emotions such as disgust. Together with his lab team, they will seek both behavioral and physiological evidence for the hypothesis. They will test this hypothesis with participants from China, Israel, and Italy.

In contemporary society, population growth combined with global warming concerns has made the adoption of innovative, sustainable products a crucial global issue, leading groups such as the World Health Organization to list health and sustainable development as a key issue to tackle in upcoming years. However, while sustainability can be beneficial both for the environment and society at large, many people find some of the most promising sustainable products such as recycled wastewater and insect-based food disgusting. This hinders the adoption of these products that could otherwise have a beneficial impact on reducing global water shortages as well as our ecological footprint. Therefore, we will use our CISSR grant is to explore ways to nudge individuals into consuming sustainable but aversive products, specifically by examining the impact of presenting these products in a native versus non-native language. Prior research suggests that using a non-native language influences judgments and decisions by attenuating emotions; as such, it may also reduce the feelings of disgust aversive products elicit and thereby increase their consumption. To examine this hypothesis, we will describe to participants from China, Italy, and Israel sustainable but aversive products in their native or a foreign language, and then offer them the opportunity to consume the products. We will also collect ratings of disgust as well as physiological indicators of visceral reactions. We expect that bilinguals using a foreign language to experience less disgust and consequently to consume more of these products. Positive findings could be used to build concrete interventions to increase sustainable practices worldwide.

Biography
Boaz Keysar is a Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Cognition program at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1991. He studies the relationship between decision making, language and communication and has published extensively in scientific journals such as Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Cognition, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His work has been featured in media outlets such as Science Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, National Post-Canada, Der Spiegel – Germany, China Daily – China, Smart Money – Russia, Science daily, LiveScience.com, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Freakonomics Radio.

He has been awarded major research grants from federal agencies and private foundations such as the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.  Professor Keysar’s honors and awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship.

Together with his wife, Linda Ginzel, he is the co-founder of Kids In Danger, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving children’s product safety. For his advocacy work he has been named Chicagoan of The Year, was awarded the Community Advocate Hope and Courage Award by Lurie Children’s Hospital, the Distinguished Service to the Community Award by the Princeton Club of Chicago, and the President’s Service award from President Clinton, the nation’s highest honor for volunteer service.

Economic, Social, and Environmental Drivers of Rural to Urban Migration in the Lower Mekong River Basin of Cambodia

Over the past thirty years, economic growth, demographic recovery, and environmental changes have fueled rural migration into the cities of Cambodia. Alan Kolata and Sabina Shaikh are expanding their data collection in the Mekong River Basin to analyze the effects of migration on the viability of traditional rural livelihoods and model the interpenetrating economic, social, and environmental drivers of migration from villages to urban centers like Phnom Penh.

Over the past thirty years, Cambodia has experienced accelerated economic growth and demographic recovery following the collapse of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that evacuated cities and caused the death of nearly 1.7 million people. This extended period of recovery generated increased employment opportunities and a significant decrease in poverty, but also contributed to major physical changes in the Mekong River's hydrological regime and geomorphic processes. In addition, the rapid construction of multiple dams and other large-scale changes in land use along the entirety of the Mekong have affected river hydrology, sedimentation rates, nutrient fluxes and associated components of agricultural and fishery productivity.

Economic growth, demographic recovery, and climate change are accelerating urbanization and rural-to-urban migration in Cambodia. Based on prior knowledge, literature, and new observations from focus group and key informant interviews conducted in December of 2017 with the support of our current CISSR grant, we will expand data collection and analysis to quantify and model the interpenetrating economic, social, and environmental drivers of migration from villages to urban centers in the Mekong River region of Cambodia, particularly among women who constitute a significant proportion of rural-to-urban migrants and have left traditional roles of agricultural household management and child rearing. This research is part of a larger cross-disciplinary effort that measures hydrologically-based ecosystem services in the Mekong River floodplains to assess the viability of rural livelihoods under distinct scenarios of climate change, economic development, migration, and other cultural factors, such as gender roles, social norms and values that affect human response to biosocial change. 

Biography - Alan L. Kolata received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University and currently holds the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professorship at the University of Chicago. He pursues interdisciplinary research projects studying the long-term interactions of humans with their physical environment, including the effects of climate change on human communities. He has conducted research in Bolivia, Peru, Thailand and, most recently, Cambodia where he and his collaborators focus on the environmental and social impacts of large-scale hydroelectric development of the Mekong River Basin.

Biography - Sabina Shaikh is the Director of the Program on Global Environment and Environment, Agriculture and Food (EAF) working group at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Lecturer in the Social Science Collegiate Division and Harris School for Public Policy. Sabina’s research focuses on the economic valuation of environmental resources and the development of market and behavioral-based programs for natural resource management. Her current research projects include the effect of Mekong River water sustainability on livelihoods in Cambodia, and the association of diabetes in the U.S. with exposure to environmental contaminants. Dr. Shaikh holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis.

Land Reform and Civil Conflict: Theory and Evidence from Peru

Many developing countries pursue land reform to address gross inequalities in rural communities, but what are the real effects of these reforms? Faculty Fellow Michael Albertus will examine how land reforms in Peru from 1969 to 1980 influenced rural public education, the political power of indigenous communities, and a guerrilla insurgency. Using detailed information on over 20,000 land expropriations, he hopes to show that land reform in Peru was geographically and socially uneven, leaving some areas underdeveloped and prone to high levels of violence.

This project seeks to examine the long-term implications of land reform for a range of key development outcomes such as the provision of public education, political integration of historically excluded indigenous groups, and civil conflict.

The main case I will study is Peru. Half of all of the private agricultural land in the entire country of Peru was expropriated and redistributed under military rule from 1969-80, mostly to peasants who previously worked on large, semi-feudal estates. This reorganization of the countryside is hypothesized to be at the heart of a host of consequential subsequent developments in Peru: the rise of rural public schooling, the greater political power of indigenous groups, and even the brutal Shining Path insurgency that ultimately killed roughly 70,000 people between 1980 and 2000. My project will investigate these relationships by geographically linking earlier land reform in Peru with these diverse development outcomes to determine how the scope and character of land reform impacted them.

Biography
Michael Albertus is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His research interests include political regimes and redistribution, regime transitions and stability, politics under dictatorship, clientelism, and civil conflict.

His first book, Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform, was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series. It won the 2016 Luebbert Book Award for the best book in comparative politics published in the previous two years, as well as the 2017 LASA Bryce Wood Book Award for the best book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities. His research has also been published in the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Economics & Politics, World Development, and Latin American Research Review. His second book, Flawed Since Conception: Authoritarian Legacies Under Democracy, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Long-Term Effects of Human Rights Violations during the Pinochet Dictatorship

The 1973 coup in Chile brought with it an extraordinary amount of repression as the military regime routinely murdered and imprisoned its opponents. What are the political and economic legacies of that repression? Faculty Fellows Luis Martinez and Maria Bautista will explore this question by collecting biographical information on victims, information on detention centers, and lists of employees dismissed from their jobs for political reasons. Martinez and Bautista’s analysis will tell us if the repression of that era continues to influence political preferences, political participation, and economic inequality. 

The objective of this research project is to investigate the long run consequences state-led repression on various economic and political outcomes. After the coup of September 11, 1973 the Chilean military under Pinochet engaged in regular murder, repression and torture of its opponents. Chile’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ concluded that 3,197 people had been murdered and that more than 40,000 victims were subjected to physical and psychological torture for political reasons at nearly 1,200 sites spread throughout the country. Another 150,000 people had their work contracts terminated as a result of their political affiliations. This project employs rich sub-national data to establish if there is evidence of any long-lasting economic and political effects of the systematic violation of human rights during the military dictatorship.

We will examine whether politically motivated repression affects political outcomes such as competitiveness of elections or people’s willingness to participate in political or social movements years after it has taken place. The answers to these questions have important implications regarding the quality and legitimacy of democracy: Is it the case that left-wing parties do relatively worse today in localities that experienced more repression 40 years ago? Do people remain afraid to join a political party or to belong to a union?

We also seek to establish the relationship between state-led human rights violations and economic outcomes. The largest increase in inequality recorded in the post-WWII period was experienced by Chile under Pinochet’s regime and we want to test the hypothesis that repression by the military directly contributed to this increase. The main mechanism we want to explore is to look at how violence targeted at political actors promoting greater redistribution, such as union members or left-wing politicians, could have had potentially large effects on inequality. For instance, exposure to violence may have modified the behavior of these actors or their leverage in wage-setting negotiations. As mentioned above, thousands of people were dismissed from their employment or detained for long periods of time for their political affiliations and this may have also played a role.

Biography - Maria Angélica Bautista will join Harris, where she is currently a post-doctoral scholar, as assistant professor in the fall of 2017. She received her PhD in political science from Brown University. Her research focuses on the political, economic and social consequences of state-led repression. Her PhD dissertation studies the case of military dictatorship in Chile based on a unique dataset she collected and explores the extent to which repression affected individual political preferences, behavior and economic outcomes. She also studies the heterogeneous effects and the intergenerational consequences of repression. In a parallel research project together with James Robinson and Juan Galán (Harvard University) she is studying the experience of the Colombian paramilitary groups that demobilized in 2006. They goal is to have a better understanding of how paramilitary groups used violence to different extents and explore at a micro level how violence is used to build institutions.

Biography - Luis Martinez is an assistant professor at Harris. He received a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics. His main research interest is in the political economy of development. His current research uses sub-national data from Colombia to look for systematic differences in the effects of tax revenue and natural resource rents on governance and accountability. In a recently published paper in the Journal of Development Economics he documented the intensification of civil conflict that resulted from increased access by Colombian insurgent groups to Venezuelan territory during the administration of Hugo Chávez. He is now also studying the effects of trade liberalization on political violence.

Negotiation to Resolve Conflict: Using a Second Language to Overcome Psychological Barriers

Faculty Fellow and Professor of Psychology Boaz Keysar will determine if the use of a foreign language in negotiations can help overcome barriers to peace in some of the globe’s most intractable conflicts. Previous research shows that the use of foreign language can reduce emotional responses to information. Keysar's survey experiment will present peace proposals to Palestinians and Israelis in English to assess whether or not a foreign language can mitigate the participants’ biases. 

In contemporary society, population growth combined with global warming concerns has made the adoption of innovative, sustainable products a crucial global issue, leading groups such as the World Health Organization to list health and sustainable development as a key issue to tackle in upcoming years. However, while sustainability can be beneficial both for the environment and society at large, many people find some of the most promising sustainable products such as recycled wastewater and insect-based food disgusting. This hinders the adoption of these products that could otherwise have a beneficial impact on reducing global water shortages as well as our ecological footprint. Therefore, we will use our CISSR grant is to explore ways to nudge individuals into consuming sustainable but aversive products, specifically by examining the impact of presenting these products in a native versus non-native language. Prior research suggests that using a non-native language influences judgments and decisions by attenuating emotions; as such, it may also reduce the feelings of disgust aversive products elicit and thereby increase their consumption. To examine this hypothesis, we will describe to participants from China, Italy, and Israel sustainable but aversive products in their native or a foreign language, and then offer them the opportunity to consume the products. We will also collect ratings of disgust as well as physiological indicators of visceral reactions. We expect that bilinguals using a foreign language to experience less disgust and consequently to consume more of these products. Positive findings could be used to build concrete interventions to increase sustainable practices worldwide.

Biography
Boaz Keysar is a Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Cognition program at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1991. He studies the relationship between decision making, language and communication and has published extensively in scientific journals such as Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Cognition, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His work has been featured in media outlets such as Science Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, National Post-Canada, Der Spiegel – Germany, China Daily – China, Smart Money – Russia, Science daily, LiveScience.com, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and Freakonomics Radio.

He has been awarded major research grants from federal agencies and private foundations such as the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation.  Professor Keysar’s honors and awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship.

Together with his wife, Linda Ginzel, he is the co-founder of Kids In Danger, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving children’s product safety. For his advocacy work he has been named Chicagoan of The Year, was awarded the Community Advocate Hope and Courage Award by Lurie Children’s Hospital, the Distinguished Service to the Community Award by the Princeton Club of Chicago, and the President’s Service award from President Clinton, the nation’s highest honor for volunteer service.

Human Response to Environmental Change in the Lower Mekong River Basin

Faculty Fellows Alan Kolata and Sabina Shaikh will model human responses to ecological changes in the Mekong River Basin. Millions of people in Southeast Asia depend on the Mekong River’s fluctuating water regime, but the construction of power facilities, climate change, and new forms of land use have made the Mekong Basin a hotbed of rapid environmental transformation. Kolata and Shaikh, along with a team of geographers and engineers, will travel to Cambodia and use a range of methods to collect data on how social norms and cultural practices shape human responses to environmental change. 

Water sustainability is ultimately a human problem, not a physical or biological problem. Our project focuses on how people respond to current and impending environmental change caused by human activities in the complex hydrological system of the Mekong River. The natural flood-pulse of the Mekong River creates a predictable fluctuating water regime that millions of humans depend on for their livelihoods. Economic development, the emergence of an extensive hydropower industry, land use conversions, and climate change are currently altering the Mekong flood-pulse at an accelerated pace. These transformations make this region a “hotspot” of rapid environmental change that will result in a smaller floodplain, a shorter flooding period, and significant alterations in floodplain habitat. These alterations could lower ecosystem productivity for those who depend on the River.

Our project will measure the existing hydrologically-based human activities in the Cambodian Region of the Mekong River floodplain and examine how those activities will change under a range of climate change and human development scenarios. We will describe the relationships between ecosystem services, economic livelihoods, and cultural adaptations of floodplain inhabitants to derive possible adaptive pathways for human populations. Although focused on the Lower Mekong floodplains of Cambodia, results of this research will be applicable to other areas in developing countries with major riparian communities and with plans for future hydropower development, such as the Brazilian Amazon, West Africa, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta.

Biography - Alan L. Kolata received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University and currently holds the Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professorship at the University of Chicago. He pursues interdisciplinary research projects studying the long-term interactions of humans with their physical environment, including the effects of climate change on human communities. He has conducted research in Bolivia, Peru, Thailand and, most recently, Cambodia where he and his collaborators focus on the environmental and social impacts of large-scale hydroelectric development of the Mekong River Basin.

Biography - Sabina Shaikh is the Director of the Program on Global Environment and Environment, Agriculture and Food (EAF) working group at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Lecturer in the Social Science Collegiate Division and Harris School for Public Policy. Sabina’s research focuses on the economic valuation of environmental resources and the development of market and behavioral-based programs for natural resource management. Her current research projects include the effect of Mekong River water sustainability on livelihoods in Cambodia, and the association of diabetes in the U.S. with exposure to environmental contaminants. Dr. Shaikh holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis.

Revisiting Electoral Personalism: What Does the Personal Vote Imply for Parties and Public Policy?

Electoral systems based on Proportional Representation are diverse and used throughout the world, from Belgium and Sweden to Brazil and Indonesia. Faculty Fellow Monika Nalepa and a team of international political scientists will reconsider the conventional wisdom concerning electoral behavior and public policy in different Proportional Representation systems. By analyzing outcomes such as party strength, public spending, and levels of corruption, Nalepa hopes to show that differences among proportional representation systems have been overdrawn, and that the dysfunctions thought to be characteristic of one system are also present in others. 

In countries throughout the world, electoral systems are based on what is known as proportional representation. Voters cast their votes for their preferred party or candidate, and legislative seats are apportioned according to the number each party/candidate receives. There are different methods of organizing electoral competition in these systems. In closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) systems, voters vote for parties, with the party leadership allocating seats according to its candidate ranking. In open-list proportional representation (OLPR), voters vote for individual candidates. A literature that is nearly three decades old has argued that because of its features, CLPR systems will be more partisan and more focused on national policy since candidates are beholden to a centralized party leadership. OLPR systems will be more candidate-centered, and politicians will place local, parochial interests before the national interest.

The goal of this project is to reconsider this received wisdom and question whether the grip of parties over candidates in CLPR systems is as strong as the conventional wisdom discussed above suggests. Professor Monika Nalepa together with CISSR visitor, Jose Antonio Cheibub will organize a workshop at CISSR to explore whether the contrast between CLPR and OLPR has been overestimated in both the electoral and legislative arenas. The invited papers from a team of international political scientists will investigate why parties may play a relevant role in affecting candidate behavior in OLPR, both during the campaign and in the legislature.