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Her primary research interests are in comparative politics, with a focus on political institutions, legislative politics, and the effects of institutions on political behavior. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 and currently holds a visiting position at Pennsylvania State University. Dissertation Title: “Member States' Success and Influence in European Union Policymaking” The dissertation explores how legislative institutional arrangements interact with the preferences of the principal actors to shape the process and outcomes of legislative bargaining. The focus in the dissertation is legislative decision-making in the European Union (EU). The dissertation illustrates how the complex institutional structure of the EU influences the member states' ability to secure favorable negotiation outcomes and their behavior during the legislative process. Fieldwork: Interviews with officials from the European Union institutions, Brussels 2006. Publications:
Advisors: G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Tasos Kalandrakis, Bonnie Meguid His dissertation is a book-length project that examines the influence of income distribution on the establishment and consolidation of democratic regimes. It argues and empirically demonstrates that inequality harms consolidation, but that its effect on democratization depends on the level of economic development. In middle income countries inequality fosters democratization; in poor and rich countries, however, it inhibits democratization. The third section of the dissertation analyses and tests the impact of intra- and interethnic equality on democratic consolidation. The causal mechanisms of these inequality analyses are tested with case studies, in part based on field work to be conducted in West Africa in Spring 2010. Publications: “Inequality and Democracy: Why Inequality Harms Consolidation But Does Not Affect Democratization” forthcoming in World Politics (October 2009.) M.A. degree in Economics, Queens University 2004. Advisors: Gretchen Helmke, Mark Kayser, Randall Stone, Bing Powell. Her dissertation consists of three essays on the UN Security Council. The first paper analyzes which states are more likely to get elected as non-permanent members, focusing on the similarity in states’ preferences. The second paper examines how the non-permanent members influence the outcome of bargaining as agenda setters and how the permanent members attempt to prevent it by submitting amendments or holding informal consultations. The third paper analyzes voting patterns of the permanent members. Using a newly collected data set on Security Council roll-call votes, it examines the conditions under which the permanent members are more likely to sacrifice their self-interest in order to achieve collective decisions. Overall, the dissertation generates new insights on how states bargain within an international organization.
Other research:
“The Selection and Signaling Effects of Third-Party Intervention.” W. Allen Wallis Fellow in Political Economy, 2008-2009. Advisors: John Duggan, Hein Goemans, Curtis Signorino His dissertation consists of three essays in international relations. It links the formation and political organization of the state to the extraction of resources for war, the formulation of war aims, the termination of wars and policy outcomes in international relations. It then uses this link to examine the empirical role of uncertainty in the breakdown of bargaining into violence. Awards: His paper “Endogenous War Aims and State Resolve” won the Political Science Department’s Theory and Statistical Research Laboratory Best Paper Prize in 2008. He won the Political Science Department Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in 2009. Advisors: Curtis Signorino, Tasos Kalandrakis, Hein Goemans His work stands at the intersection of international security and international political economy. His dissertation examines the interplay of war and the economy during the first half of the 20th century, with a focus on foreign trade, economic gains from conquest and occupation, and pre-war deception. In marked contrast to earlier findings, he shows that increased pre-war trade can facilitate conflict, that trade more often than not increases during wartime, and that the occupation of industrialized societies did not pay during World War II. The dissertation draws extensively upon primary sources held in archives in Germany, France, and the US and features several statistical components that corroborate the qualitative findings. He recently started a new project on the role of intelligence agencies and plans to carry out a series of interviews with the leading members of the former East German spy agency during the 2009/10 academic year. Defended in July 2008. Publications: Public Policy for Venture Capital: A Comparison of the United States and Germany. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2006. Post-doctoral associate and lecturer in the political science department at Yale University in 2008/09. Post-doctoral research associate in the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale in 2009/10. References: Hein Goemans, Bruce Russett, Ken Scheve. His dissertation explores the microfoundations of legislator and voter decision-making through the use of Bayesian statistical models. One essay formalizes the idea that legislators’ behavior is determined by weighing multiple sources of influence. The model is then applied to the U.S. Senate since 1995 to analyze how preferences, parties and constituencies factor into legislators’ behavior. A second essay analyzes the effect of war on legislators’ decisions during the American Civil War. In the last essay the analysis shifts to voters and presents a statistical model that accounts for causes of voter inability to identify their legislator’s ideology. Publications: “Missing in Action: A Bayesian Hierarchical Model for NA/DK Responses in Surveys,” Revise and Resubmit at Political Analysis. Awards: Political Science Department Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, 2008. References: Lawrence Rothenberg, Curtis Signorino, David Primo, Michael Herron Primary research interests: Domestic Political Institutions, War, and Peacemaking Her dissertation connects audience cost, diversionary war, and democratic peace theories by aligning dictatorships and democracies along a second dimension that uses variation in the institutionalized powers of the leader over foreign policy to explain rogue or responsible war and peacemaking. She argues that audience costs are a mechanism for mediation, since mediation behind closed doors allows leaders to avoid publicly backing down. She extends this theory of institutions, war and peacemaking behavior to less deadly conflict using Latin America's history of institutional variation and domestic instability. Fieldwork: Interviews with government and military members involved in the Peruvian-Ecuadorian Cenepa War and subsequent mediation including former presidents, vice presidents, the foreign minister and primary representative to the 1998 Brasilia Accords, and the General of the Army during the 1995 war amongst others, Ecuador 2008. Publication: "Influence in Terrorist Networks: From Undirected to Directed Graphs" with Steven Brams (NYU), and Hande Mutlu (NYU), Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29(7) Oct-Nov 2006: 703-718. Awards: She won the Political Science Department Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in 2008. Advisors: Hein Goemans, Mark Fey, Gretchen Helmke His dissertation examines the relationship between democratic transitions and ethnic conflict. Using a formal model he develops a theory of the “warrior’s curse,” predicting that democratic transitions are likely to induce intractable commitment problems between majority and minority groups the higher the share of the minority in the military manpower of the pre-transition regime relative to its population-share. He tests this theory by analyzing minority rebellions during the Second Wave of democratization: transitions from colonial rule post-World War II. The analysis is based on an original data set of the “colonial legacies” of 124 minority ethnic groups in ex-British colonies as well as an historical narrative on the politics of the Sikhs, an ethnic minority of India, during the transfer of power in 1947. He also examines the pre-colonial origins of ethnic bias in colonial recruitment policies and the persistence of this bias in the post-colonial period. Research experience: Archival research in the Colonial Office, British National Archives, London; National Archives of India, New Delhi; State Archives of Punjab, Chandigarh, India. Advisors: G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Gretchen Helmke, Alexandre Debs Dissertation: “Primary Rules: How Primary Election Rules Affect Congressional Elections.” His dissertation analyzes how a variety of rules governing primary elections across the states affect candidate emergence, competition and voter turnout in congressional elections. Defended in 2009. Other research: “Strategic Considerations of Minority Candidates for the US House of Representatives,” presented at APSA, 2007. Dating Primary Candidates: Timing the Decision to Run for Office” (with Richard Niemi and Lynda Powell.) Advisors: Richard Niemi, Lynda W. Powell, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman. This dissertation proposed and tests plausible mechanisms of war initiation and termination by analyzing how countries bargain when agreements cannot be enforced by outside parties and when decision-making processes at the domestic level are incorporated. The first paper analyzes how countries decide to initiate and terminate war and how they sustain peace when agreements cannot be enforced by outside parties. It demonstrates that countries can initiate conflict when there is no self-enforcing allocation that both prefer to fighting, but sustainable peace is obtained when war resolves this commitment problem by driving the allocation to a self-enforcing one. The second paper empirically estimates how status quo allocations of territory affect the likelihood of conflict using a new method for structurally estimating parameters of dynamic games. The third paper examines how the decision-making process at the domestic level can affect the bargaining outcome and the likelihood of conflict. It demonstrates that political instability and uncertainty in a country, as well as logrolling among elites, are necessary for a bargaining breakdown. Other research: EITM Summer Institute participant 2007. W. Allen Wallis Fellow in Political Economy, 2006-2007, 2007-2008. Advisors: John Duggan, Hein Goemans, Tasos Kalandrakis, Curtis S. Signorino. Dissertation: “The Political Economy of Foreign Aid.” His dissertation examines linkages between foreign aid flows and recipient country development. Specifically, it looks at the conditions under which donors coordinate the provision of foreign aid, and how volatility of aid flows affects political stability in recipient countries. The author derives a new estimator of free-riding from a formal model of impure public goods provision, and finds that donors are more likely to undersupply aid if recipient countries have good macro-economic policies. He also finds evidence that donors collude when trying to ensure access to oil supplies. Using a formal model, he develops a theory of the political economy of aid and civil conflict. Quantitative evidence indicates that unexpected aid shortfalls increase the probability of conflict. Publication: “The International Monetary Fund: A Review of the Recent Evidence.” 2008. Review of International Organizations 3(2): 123-149 (with Randall Stone.) Other research: “Estimated Connectivity Weights and the Spatial Autoregressive Model” Advisors: Randall Stone, Hein Goemans, Tasos Kalandrakis. His dissertation examines three important questions at the intersection of international relations and political methodology. Substantively, it covers the liberal and realist debate on economic interdependence and war, the influence of foreign aid in the UN General Assembly, and the power-conflict relationship. Publications:
Awards. Stuart A. Bremer Award for Best Graduate Student Paper Presented at Peace Science Society Meeting, 2007. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Binghamton University, SUNY, 2005. Advisors: Curtis Signorino, Mark Fey, Hein Goemans, Solomon Polachek |