Research

My research focuses on the political economy of state building. My new book manuscript is Creditor Coalitions and State Formation in Europe (currently under review). It argues that the rise of “creditor coalitions”—marked by when creditors in a domestic credit market gained political power—spurred two fundamental institutional changes. The first change surrounds taxation and chronicles when salaried bureaucrats, rather than local notables or tax farmers, became the main force for revenue collection. The second development examines changing forms of authority within bureaucracies, moving from patrimonial to rational-legal states. The manuscript harnesses an original dataset on seventeen European polities between 1600 and 1900 and complements these data with case studies of each polity. I published a preliminary version of this argument in World Politics.

My other current research explores the origins of good governance in the developing world. I am examining how coalitional politics influences a country’s prospects for public sector reform. I am working on case studies of historically well-governed countries in Latin America and Africa, such as Chile, Botswana, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mauritius. I anticipate that this research will develop into a book.

My first book, State Building in Boom Times: Commodities and Coalitions in Latin America and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2014, link here), also explores divergent trajectories within the developing world. During resource booms, countries ruled by coalitions of export-oriented actors (Argentina, Chile, and Mauritius) expanded their state capacity. But when exporters were politically marginalized (Colombia, Ghana, and Nigeria), countries missed analogous state building opportunities. These findings link the resource curse to coalitional politics. You can read reviews of my book here.

I have a secondary interest in research methodology. My first methods article advances an alternative perspective on what it means to measure well, using the concept of state capacity for illustration (in Sociological Methods & Research, here). My second methods article maintains that the emphasis on causal mechanisms in qualitative research should change how researchers approach case selection (in Sociological Methods & Research, here). In 2020, I coordinated a symposium on comparative area studies in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research; you can read my introduction to the symposium here.

A full list of my published and ongoing research is available on my CV.