HPE candidates on the job market

Job market season is here. As in past years, Broadstreet will be highlighting the work of candidates working in the field of historical political economy. If you are a scholar with HPE-related research who is on the market this year - or know someone who is - please reach out. We will be collecting profiles and updating this post to showcase all the exciting work of HPE scholars seeking positions this year.

Jerik Cruz, PhD candidate, MIT (https://jerikdcruz.github.io/)

JMP: World Wide Webs: How Migrant Networks and Porous Bureaucracies Forged the Knowledge Economy in the Global South (link to paper)

A long political economy tradition argues that centralized states deploying concerted industrial policies are crucial for developing productive industries. Yet developing countries that have emerged as major exporters of knowledge-based services (e.g. software/R&D/AI services) have often lacked these state structures. I advance a new theory of how the rise of these services-exporting hubs have been driven by skilled migrant networks engaging with porous and dispersed bureaucracies. These structures foster bureaucrats’ connectedness to peripheral entrepreneurial networks, allowing policymakers to leverage distributed tacit knowledge held by migrant co-nationals in processes of fine-grained collaboration. I test this argument using first-ever, agency-level datasets of industrial policy bureaucracies covering all GATT/WTO members since 1989, and historical process-tracing of the Philippines’ and Malaysia’s diverging knowledge economy transitions based on 50 elite interviews. My results challenge a vast literature underscoring “Weberian” bureaucracies and autonomous “developmental states” as prerequisites for structural transformation in the era of knowledge-based capitalism.

Dmitri Kofanov, Postdoc at the Center for Governance and Markets, University of Pittsburgh (https://sites.google.com/view/dmitrii-kofanov)

JMP: Local Democratization and Public Finance - R&R, American Political Science Review (link to paper)

This paper examines the influence of subnational representative institutions on fiscal outcomes and public goods provision, leveraging an understudied large-scale institutional innovation: the introduction of elected self-government in the cities of the Russian Empire from the 1870s. Applying a staggered difference-in-differences design to novel city-level panel datasets, I find that the reform had a large positive impact: it increased revenues and expenditures by 20–50%, enabling an expanded allocation of funds to education, healthcare, fire protection, and other areas, and significantly increased the number of primary schools. The effect size depended on the presence of commercial classes in the city population. Disaggregated budgets suggest that the outcomes were shaped by the preferences of both state authorities and local communities. These results demonstrate that in an authoritarian setting, a reform bringing even limited representation and autonomy at the local level can empower new social groups and promote development.

Daniel Lowery, PhD Candidate, Harvard University (https://www.daniellowery.net/)

JMP: Unmaking the State: Succession Conflict, State Building, and Long-Run Political Development (link to paper)

Internal conflicts impede long-run state development. This paper argues that succession conflicts—violent struggles over the throne—fractured elite coalitions, disrupted bureaucratic expansion, and undermined the state’s ability to monopolize violence or wage external war. These conflicts over the transfer of power had persistent effects. States with more frequent historical succession conflicts exhibit persistently lower fiscal capacity, less effective governments, and more neopatrimonial governance. Using original data on over 2,300 reigns across 115 monarchies from 1000 to 1800, I construct a measure of historical succession conflict exposure and link it to modern outcomes via spatial crosswalks. Instrumental variable estimates in early modern Europe suggest a plausibly causal relationship. The results reveal how the universal problem of succession generated institutional breakdown and help explain durable cross-national variation in state capacity today.

Natalia Vasilenok, PhD Candidate, Stanford University (https://nvasilenok.github.io/)

JMP 1: Reading Orwell in Moscow (link to paper)

In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.

JMP 2: Peasant Commune and the Demand for Land Titling in Imperial Russia (link to paper)

Despite their potential economic benefits, land titling reforms around the world often encounter only moderate participation rates. Why do farmers hesitate to claim private land titles? To address this question, this paper examines the historical case of the 1906 land reform in the Russian Empire. For the first time in the country's history, the reform enabled peasants to obtain private titles to plots that had previously been held under communal tenure. Drawing on newly digitized commune-level data from the province of Simbirsk, the paper argues that the perceived benefits and costs of transitioning to private property were shaped by differences in the practice of land reallocation among the members of a commune, known as repartitions. I find that the reform was much less successful in communes where repartitioning had developed as a substitute for the land market. The results suggest that the design of land reforms must account for the incentive structures created by traditional property rights regimes.