Below is an alphabetical list of Yale Ph.D. students, and recent graduates, currently on the job market. Please feel free to contact them, their advisors, or the DGS for additional information.
Peter M. Aronow (Quantitative Methods, Political Economy, American Politics) Website
Dissertation: Model Assisted Causal Inference (Advisor(s): Don Green)
My research focuses on developing methods for sampling-theoretic causal inference, with particular reference to the domains of American politics and political economy. My work has appeared in Journal of Politics, Sociological Methods and Research and Statistics and Probability Letters.
Regina Bateson (Comparative Politics, International Relations, Research Methods) Website
Dissertation: Order and Violence in Postwar Guatemala (Advisor(s): Stathis Kalyvas, Susan Stokes, Elisabeth Wood)
My research lies at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations, with particular emphasis on the political consequences of violence. My dissertation argues that local experiences during civil wars shape communities’ strategies for providing public security in the postwar period, even decades after a war has ended. I also study the politics of crime, and my article on crime victimization and political participation will appear in the August 2012 issue of the American Political Science Review. I hold a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and I was previously a Foreign Service Officer for the US Department of State.
Teresa M. Bejan (Political Theory, History of Political Thought, American Political Thought and Development, Religion and Politics) Website
Dissertation: Mere Civility: Toleration and its Limits in early modern England and America (Advisor(s): Bryan Garsten, Karuna Mantena, Steven Smith, and James Q. Whitman)
My dissertation explores the intersection between contemporary political theory and the political thought of early modern England and America by examining recurrent appeals to civility in debates about religious toleration. What exactly is “civility”, and how does it relate to toleration? After considering competing accounts offered by Roger Williams, Hobbes, and Locke, I turn to contemporary debates and defend a theory of “mere” civility adapted from Williams. I have published articles in the Oxford Review of Education and History of European Ideas and hold previous degrees from the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge. In 2010-2011, I returned to Cambridge as a Fox Fellow.
Lihi Ben Shitrit, PhD May 2012 (Comparative Politics, International Relations, Women and Politics, Contemporary Theory, Middle East Politics)
Dissertation: Frames of Exception: Women’s Activism in Religious Political Movements (Advisor(s): Ellen Lust, Libby Wood, Adria Lawrence)
My work examines religious politics in the contemporary Middle East. The dissertation sets out to explain variation in forms of women’s activism in socially conservative religious-political movements. Through a comparative study (conducted in Arabic and Hebrew) of women’s activism in four movements - the Jewish Settlers in the West Bank, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel and the Palestinian Hamas - the dissertation demonstrates how activists use ideological components unrelated to the subject of women to expand spaces for transgressive modes of political action. The research was supported by the Social Science Research Council, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and others.
Edwin Camp, PhD May 2012 (Comparative Politics, Empirical Methods, Formal Theory) Website
Dissertation: Tending to the Barrio: Broker Motivation and the Electoral Success of Political Machines. (Advisor(s): Susan Stokes, John Roemer, and Thad Dunning)
I am a Postdoctoral Associate for the George Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale University. I am the recipient of the Annie G.K. Garland Memorial Fellowship (2010), the MacMillan Center Dissertation Research Grant (2009), the George Walter Leitner Felllowship (2009), and the Agrarian Studies Fellowship (2006). My research develops unique insights into how political machines dominate electorates and how the same dynamics that led to their dominance can ultimately cause their decline. My dissertation used formal theory and multiple research methods to better understand the internal organization of political parties and the electoral efficiency of political machines.
Allison Sovey Carnegie (International Relations, Political Economy, Quantitative Methods, Formal Theory) Website
Dissertation: Political Hold-up Problems in International Relations (Advisor(s): Ken Scheve, Giovanni Maggi, Thad Dunning, Susan Hyde)
I am pursuing a joint PhD in Political Science and Economics at Yale University. I currently hold an M.Phil. in Economics from Yale University. My dissertation identifies a central barrier to international cooperation, “political hold-up problems,” and demonstrates that international institutions can help to solve them. This observation allows me to generate new insights into several enduring puzzles in international relations including what types of cooperation problems international institutions are best suited to solve and who benefits most from participation. My work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science and the Election Law Journal.
Madhavi Devasher (Comparative Politics, International Relations, Quantitative and Qualitative Methods, South Asia Studies) Website
Dissertation: Masjid versus Mandal: Ethnic Voting in India (Advisor(s): Steven Wilkinson).
I study ethnic and religious politics and my fieldwork so far has focused on politics in India. My dissertation examines ethnic voting in India. I develop a theory to explain how ethnic voters analyze the electoral arena and rank their interests at the constituency and state level in order to make choices about who to vote for. I carried out an original survey of 1600 Muslim voters in Uttar Pradesh in order to gather data on vote choices, issue preferences and demographics. I also interviewed politicians from all major parties and voters. My research was supported by the Macmillan Center International Research Dissertation Research Grant.
Shawn Fraistat (Political Theory) Website
Dissertation: Liberal Democracy, Authority, and Care (Advisor(s): Steven Smith, Bryan Garsten, Karuna Mantena)
In contrast to contemporary debates about political authority centered on questions of legitimacy and justification, my dissertation explores the link between political authority and care. To what extent is the political relationship a caregiving relationship? To what extent does the concept of care illuminate citizens’ interest in political authority and clarify the functions it ought to perform? I focus in particular on writings of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Godwin, thinkers for whom care played a central role in their understanding of political authority. These three authors theorize the connection between authority and care in insightful, surprising, and sharply contrasting ways. I argue that their work sheds light on the role political authority can and ought to play in promoting individual flourishing, and in sustaining and reproducing liberal democratic forms of community.
Brian J. Fried (Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Methodology) Website
Dissertation: The End of the Closed Corral: Explaining the Decline of Clientelism in Brazil (Advisor(s): Susan C. Stokes, Ken Scheve)
My dissertation investigates the surprising decline of clientelism in Brazil. I provide evidence that this shift is occurring and discuss why it transpired. I combine qualitative evidence gathered during 2 years of fieldwork with quantitative analysis of existing and original survey data to show that a previously overlooked factor—the professionalization of the civil service—is fundamental to explaining the increased reliance on technocratic policies in Brazil. I have published articles in World Development, the Latin American Research Review, and the American Journal of Public Health. My research has been supported by Fulbright Hayes and National Science Foundation research fellowships.
Calvert W. Jones (Comparative Politics, International Relations, Middle East Politics, Methodology, International Security) Website
Dissertation: Bedouins into Bourgeois: Social Engineering, Globalization, and the Knowledge Economy in the United Arab Emirates (Advisor(s): Ellen Lust, Jim Scott, Thad Dunning)
My dissertation examines social engineering in the United Arab Emirates, where rulers are seeking to reshape citizens as drivers of a new knowledge-based economy. To build theory about the conditions under which social engineering succeeds or fails, I use a multi-method research design, including rare palace ethnography, an experiment, and a difference-in-differences survey-based approach, to identify goals, processes, and outcomes—intended and potentially unintended—with greater precision than is typical in the existing literature. My publications include peer-reviewed articles in International Security and Intelligence and National Security, and I hold master’s degrees from Berkeley (Information Management) and Cambridge (International Relations).
Paul D. Kenny (Comparative Politics) Website
Dissertation: The Patronage Network: Broker Power, Populism, and Democracy (Advisor(s): James Scott, Steven Wilkinson, Stathis Kalyvas, Jacob Hacker)
My research and teaching interests are in the areas of regime dynamics and conflict processes. My dissertation attempts to explain why seemingly stable patronage democracies are prone to democratic crises and populist authoritarian reversals. I put forward a novel theory that has both macro- and micro-level components linked by the logic of network dynamics. Quantitative and qualitative empirical analyses are based on sub-national evidence from India and cross-national evidence from Latin America. My other main area of research concerns the microfoundations of conflict, some of which has appeared in Polity and International Studies Review.
Paul Lagunes, PhD May 2012 (Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Latin American Politics, Public Administration, Latino Politics, Urban Politics) Website
Dissertation: Monitoring as a Democratic Imperative: A Study on Corruption and Accountability in Mexico (Advisor(s): Susan Rose-Ackerman, Susan D. Hyde, Frances Rosenbluth)
Free elections in Mexico and other recently democratized nations have failed to make local urban governments more responsive to the public interest. This critical problem is made evident by the persistence of corruption, which I argue is explained by five factors that are beyond the electorate’s realm of influence: special interest groups; vitiated bureaucrats; flawed laws; a captured judiciary; and a climate of impunity. In order to break the corrupt status quo, I theorize that independent audits over sensitive governmental processes that promise to punish deviant agents have the capacity to heighten discipline, stringency, and honesty among civil servants. Stated succinctly, I maintain that external monitoring and credible sanctions can improve officials’ overall performance. My work relies on participant observational and field experimental methods.
Shivaji Mukherjee (Comparative Politics, International Relations, Security Studies, South Asian Politics)
Dissertation: Colonial Origins of Maoist Insurgency in India: Long Term Effects of Indirect Rule (Advisor(s): Steven Wilkinson, Kenneth Scheve, Jason Lyall, Tariq Thachil, Libby Wood).
My dissertation answers the puzzle of why the Maoist insurgency in India, called India’s largest internal security threat, occurs in certain areas of India but not others. It exploits data gathered during extensive field work in these Maoist affected zones, an all India events data set, and archival data, to argue that different forms of colonial indirect rule under the British set up long term political opportunity structures for leftist insurgency in the future. My dissertation develops two new instruments for colonial indirect rule to deal with selection bias. My analysis of sons of the soil insurgencies and civil war duration is forthcoming in Civil Wars. I have received the Agrarian Studies Fellowship (2006), the USIP Peace Scholar Dissertation grant (2008), MacMillan Center Dissertation Research Grant (2008), the NSF dissertation improvement grant (2011), and the Leitner Felllowship (2010, 2012).
Leonid Peisakhin, PhD May 2012 (Comparative Politics, Political Economy, International Relations, Quantitative Methods) Website
Dissertation: Long Shadow of the Past: Identity, Norms, and Political Behavior (Advisor(s): Stathis Kalyvas, Susan Stokes, Keith Darden)
I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Juan March Institute. I am currently working on a book manuscript that explores processes by which political and economic identities are created, persist, and change. Drawing on a natural experiment that divided a homogenous population of ethnic Ukrainians between Russian and Austrian empires I demonstrate that informal institutions, like norms stemming from political identities, have a remarkable staying power and can negate the effects of formal institutions. All of my work is multi-method, and though I am particularly interested in post-Soviet and European politics my research is first and foremost question driven.
Juan Rebolledo, PhD May 2012 (Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Formal Methods, Quantitative Methods) Website
Dissertation: Voting with the Enemy: A Theory of Democratic Support for Subnational Authoritarians (Advisor(s):
My dissertation (Departmental Honors; University Distinction) examines the puzzle of the persistence, within democratic countries, of subnational regions with authoritarian characteristics. In countries as diverse as India, Brazil, the Philippines, Mexico, and Argentina regimes with authoritarian characteristics successfully maintain control over subnational units despite national democratization. My dissertation explains why the democratic national government, which once fought authoritarian abuse, seem to be unwilling or unable to act against these regional autocrats specially when they are controlled by opposition parties. In addition I am currently working on papers on the rule of law and political competition as well as on income inequality.
Lani Rowe (Political Theory, Religion and Ethics, International Relations) Website
Dissertation: Love and War in the Writings of St. Augustine (Advisor(s): Steven Smith, Bryan Garsten, Carlos Eire)
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department specializing in political philosophy. My current work looks at the relationship of love to war in the writings of St. Augustine. I was also the co-founding student coordinator of the MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics and Society and am affiliated with the non-denominational, Buddhist non-profit The Interdependence Project in NYC. The next step in my research agenda is to make explicit parallelisms between Augustine’s understanding of temporality and dependency and the Buddhist conceptions of impermanence and interdependence, eventually moving my work more toward a comparative political investigation of the ethics of love in Christianity and Buddhism.
Joshua Simon, PhD May 2012 (Political Theory, Latin American Politics) Website
Dissertation: The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Ideas of American Independence in Comparative Perspective (Advisor(s): Bruce Ackerman)
Joshua Simon is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Politics at the New School for Social Research for the academic year 2012-13. A political theorist, his research focuses on the history of Latin American political thought. He is particularly interested in debates on imperialism, constitutionalism, and pan-Latin Americanism. He is currently working on a book manuscript, titled The Ideology of Creole Revolution, which shows that the leaders of the independence movements in the United States and Latin America offered similar defenses of their rebellions, proposed similar constitutions for their newly-independent societies, and pursued similar programs of territorial expansion and internal colonization after independence was won. It argues that these points of ideological convergence reflect the influence of a common feature of the American independence movements: they were led by Creoles, the European-descended, American-born settler elite of the colonies.
Peter J. Verovsek (Political Theory, International Relations, European Politics) Website
Dissertation: A New Beginning for Europe: Memory, Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War. (Advisor(s): Seyla Benhabib, Bryan Garsten, Keith A. Darden, Adam Tooze)
The memory of two world wars played a crucial role in the origins of the EU. Building on twentieth-century continental philosophy, I argue that the events of 1914-1945 created a rift in European understandings of the past, giving leaders the freedom to rethink the foundations of political order and providing them with important cognitive, motivational and justificatory resources. Using historical and archival research, I show how Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer drew on the past to create Europe in 1950. I argue that memory has continued to influence the EU, playing an important role in the ongoing Euro-crisis.
Kyohei Yamada (Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Japanese Politics) Website
Dissertation: Municipal Mergers and Representation: Examining the Effect of the Municipal Mergers on Campaign Behaviors and Distributive Outcomes in Japan (Advisor(s): Frances Rosenbluth, Alan Gerber)
My dissertation focuses on the recent wave of municipal mergers in Japan and examines whether and to what extent the boundary consolidations changed political powers of rural voters at the local and national levels. I use observational data, interviews, and a nationwide survey to explore the question. I am also working on a project aiming to understand how political parties adapt or fail to adapt to changes in institutions, focusing on the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan and how it attempted to adapt to the new strategic environment after the electoral rule change and reapportionment in 1994.
Paulo Spada, PhD May 2012 (Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Public Policy, Urban Politics, Behavior, Latin American Politics) Website
Dissertation: Political Competition in Deliberative and Participatory Institutions (Advisor(s): Archon Fung, Elisabeth Wood, Susan Rose-Ackerman, James R. Vreeland, Donald Green)
I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. My primary work investigates how and when democratic innovations reshape political representation, promote accountability, and affect the planning and delivery of public policy. I am currently working on a book manuscript, entitled “The Politics of Democratic Innovations” that examines the causes and consequences of a particular innovation, participatory budgeting, in both new and established democracies. My secondary work investigates candidates’ office seeking behavior during electoral campaigns and explores issues of discrimination and electoral targeting on core and swing voters.
Hans Christian Siller (Political Theory, Constitutionalism) Website
Dissertation: Democratic exclusions - disenfranchising ‘all those affected’ and the legitimacy of judicial review (Advisor(s): Ian Shapiro, Seyla Benhabib, Susan Rose-Ackerman)
I am political theorist with a particular interest in legitimacy, social justice and constitutionalism. My dissertation provides a new normative perspective on the phenomenon that democratic regimes often decide many high-stakes policy issues through judicial review. But why should a democratic regime have a constitutional court? I argue that the court’s participation in democratic law-making is desirable, not because of its alleged ability to protect rights, but because of its institutional capacity for impartial judgment which can counter-balance the partiality-driven ordinary legislative process.
Onur Bakiner, PhD May 2012 (Comparative Politics; Contemporary Political Theory; Transitional Justice; Latin American Politics; Politics of Memory) Website
Dissertation: Coming to Terms with the Past: Power, Memory and Legitimacy in Truth Commissions (Advisor(s): Elisabeth J. Wood, Seyla Benhabib, Jeffrey Alexander)
I am Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. My dissertation, awarded department and university distinction in the Department of Political Science at Yale University (2011), examines the social and political implications of a society’s coming to terms with its past through a truth commission. My research was supported by a yearlong research fellowship from MacMillan Center, Yale University, and a travel grant from the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, Yale University, for the 2008-2009 academic year. An article that came out of this project was published in the International Journal of Transitional Justice (2010).
Uday Chandra (Power and Resistance, State Formation, South Asian Politics, Ethnographic and Historical Methods) Website
Dissertation: Negotiating Leviathan: Statemaking and Resistance in the Margins of Modern India (Advisor(s): James C. Scott, Elisabeth J. Wood, K. Sivaramakrishnan)
My dissertation research, funded by a grant from the American Institute of Indian Studies, revisits classic questions of power and resistance via a study of the origins and social bases of the ongoing Maoist insurgency in the forests of eastern India. My articles have been accepted for publication at leading journals, including the Law & Society Review, Contemporary South Asia, Social Movement Studies, and Historical Materialism. I am also co-editing a cross-disciplinary volume of fifteen essays by political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists on social movements in contemporary rural India; Oxford University Press will publish this volume next June.
Nathaniel Cogley (Comparative Politics, International Relations, and African Politics) Website
Dissertation: The Logic of Political Cessation: Social Esteem and Executive Tenure in Africa (Advisor(s): David Mayhew, William Foltz, and James Vreeland)
Coming soon.