Posts
Selected posts from 2017–present. Currently blogging (not always about research) at scottgehlbach.bearblog.dev.
Riding Russian Railways
Steven Fisher, formerly of Citibank Moscow and Kyiv, is curating a collection of essays on expatriate life in the 1990s and 2000s. This is my contribution. I spent several years of my adult life in Russia. Beginning in 1998, and for many years thereaf...
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Czech Memories, Then and Now
Thirty years ago, almost to the day, I moved from Washington, DC to Prague to find a profession and to pursue an interest in the postcommunist transition. I had already left behind Plan A (return to the family farm), and what might have been Plan B (pu...
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Generational Talent
Alexei Navalny was a generational talent.
Censorship, Propaganda, and Repression During Putin’s War on Ukraine
My remarks (slightly edited) last night at Ukrainathon, a 24-hour educational marathon benefiting displaced students and scholars from Ukraine. Thanks to the PONARS leadership for this great initiative. For my fifteen minutes, I would like to talk ab...
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State Power and the Power Law
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. Pavi had a great post recently on the different ways that historical political economists have conceptualized and measured state capacity. I want to follow up with a small ...
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What Did Stalinist Industrialization Accomplish?
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a blog devoted to historical political economy. The spring quarter at Chicago starts in a week. I will be teaching a course on the political economy of communism and the postcommunist transition. I love this class, which...
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The (Limited) Power of Persuasion
Cross-posted from Broadstreet, a new blog devoted to historical political economy. Among the numerous consequences of COVID for everyday life, there is this: Many Americans will not venture beyond their own dining rooms for Thanksgiving this year, and...
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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, ...
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Leaving Paris
On a warm summer day in late August 2019, we moved into a third-floor apartment in Paris’s residential 15th arrondissement. Standing on our balcony and looking to the left, we could see the district’s mairie—its town hall—and behind it the Eiffel Tower...
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Reform and Rebellion in Weak States
Sometime during my first year as a junior faculty member, I was wandering the stacks in Wisconsin's Memorial Library. I can't remember what I was looking for, but I remember what I found: a multi-volume chronicle of the peasant movement in Imperial Rus...
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Second Edition
In my second year at Wisconsin, in the fall of 2004, I taught for the first time the second course of a new sequence in formal theory. Leaning on my own graduate training, I organized the syllabus around Persson and Tabellini's Political Economics—the ...
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1989
November 9, the day the Berlin Wall came down. I was watching CNN with my friends in Ann Arbor. It must have been early evening, as there was live video of young people on the wall--singing, crying, drinking champagne. I remember thinking at the time t...
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I'm Moving
For every one of the sixteen years I have held a Ph.D., I have been a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Beginning with my seventeenth year, I will be at the University of Chicago, with a joint appointment in the Department of Polit...
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Producing (Not Writing) Your Own Book
I like to think of myself as an article writer who writes the occasional book. With my dissertation book, I did things the standard way: I wrote the manuscript, which upon completion of review I submitted (as LaTeX and supporting files) to Cambridge Un...
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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 fo...
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Serendipity
My paper with Paul Dower, Evgeny Finkel, and Steve Nafziger on "Collective Action and Representation in Autocracies" is out in the most recent issue of the APSR. It's the latest installment in a project on reform and rebellion in Imperial Russia that, ...
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Not According to Plan
David Bordwell—the William Riker of film studies—writes: It's a commonplace of film history that under Stalin (a name much in American news these days) the USSR forged a mass propaganda cinema. In order for Lenin's "most important art" to transform ...
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History and Economic History
Can historians and economic historians understand each other? That was the subtext of a panel discussion on "Number Trouble" at last weekend's meeting of the American Association for Slavic and East European Studies (ASEEES). On the panel were some of ...
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