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Watch the Borders (GIS pro tip)
Speaking of the countryside, Evgeny Finkel, Dmitrii Kofanov (UW grad student), and I are writing a short paper on peasant unrest in 1917 for a special issue of Slavic Review on the 100-year anniversary of the Russian Revolution. There are limits to what you can do in a 3000-word essay for an interdisciplinary audience—data description, a couple of maps...
Is Formal Theory Back?
In blurbing my text on Formal Models of Domestic Politics, David Laitin expressed what I then only dimly perceived to be the book's ambition: My expectation is that Scott Gehlbach’s Formal Models of Domestic Politics will become the standard text for courses in positive political economy housed in political science departments. My hope, given...
What Trump Knows (apropos of Korea, Putin, and Charlottesville)
Donald Trump is a little man who knows one big thing: the power of political rhetoric lies in not sounding like other politicians. He is not the first to understand this—Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 1992 by playing against (1980s Democratic) type—but few have honed the tool to such perfection.During the presidential campaign, this furthered two goals....
Second Pancake (on Ukraine after the Euromaidan)
A big shout-out to Grigore Pop-Eleches and Graeme Robertson, who organized a great conference at Princeton on Wednesday. It was the latest opportunity for scholars and policymakers to come together to discuss the future of Ukraine, which—I don't think this is an overdramatization—is at a critical juncture in its history as an independent nation. There is a saying in Russian: первый...
Generational talent
Alexei Navalny is dead, murdered by the man whose corruption and brutality he dared to contest. — How is it, I sometimes hear from friends or relatives here, that in a country of 300 million we cannot find some more talented person to run for president? This, I believe, misunderstands the nature of politics. True political talent is extraordinarily rare. It...
Delegation (Second Edition)
I consider the chapter on delegation in Formal Models of Domestic Politics to be unusually coherent. This is not patting myself on the back. Rather, the literature that this chapter summarizes, with its origins in the seminal work of Holmström, is of a piece. One paper follows another; all I had to do was follow the bread crumbs. What, then,...
Last Lecture
It is a tradition at UW for faculty to attend the last lecture that a colleague gives before retirement. Today it was our turn to send off Byron Shafer, Hawkins Chair of Political Science and author of numerous books on American politics—most recently, The American Political Pattern: Stability and Change, 1932-2016.1 Byron's lecture centered on this monograph's thesis that...
A Bit More about Theory in Historical Political Economy
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. As Volha mentioned in her post on Monday, she, Eugene Finkel, and I are working on something—a review of the field of historical political economy for an audience of political scientists. As part of that process, I have been thinking about the role of theory in HPE. Sean Gailmard’s recent...
Life and Death During the Transition Depression
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a new blog devoted to historical political economy. The New York Times published an interesting pair of reports on Tuesday. The first related a recent study in Health Affairs that documents a staggering, and unexpected, decline in hospital admissions since the arrival of COVID in the United States earlier this year. With the important exception of those...
A Field in Search of a Name
Still catching up after a fun weekend at Harvard for a Political Institutions and Economic Policy conference. By pure coincidence, this year’s papers were all on the political economy of nineteenth-century agricultural societies: my work with Paul Dower, Evgeny Finkel, and Steve Nafziger on peasant unrest and local self-government in Imperial Russia; a paper by Bryan Leonard and Gary...