According to conventional state–society scholarship, kinship-based institutions undermine state building. I argue that kinship networks, when geographically dispersed, cross-cut local cleavages and allow elites to internalize the gains to others from regions far from their own. Dispersed kinship networks, therefore, align the incentives of self-interested elites in favor of state building. I evaluate my argument by examining elite preferences during a state-building reform in 11th century China. I map politicians’ kinship networks using their tomb epitaphs and collect data on their political allegiances from archival materials. Statistical analysis and narrative evidence demonstrate that dispersed kinship networks align elites’ family interests with state interests and incentivize elites to support building a strong central state. My findings highlight the importance of elite social structure in facilitating state development and help understand state building in China – a useful, yet understudied, counterpoint to the Euro-centric literature.

The essay begins with a discussion of the movements, texts, and figures—notably Herbert Marcuse—both central to the intellectual development of Angela Y. Davis and most representative of Davis’s political thought. It frames Davis’s body of work as a form of fugitive theory and practice whose nineteenth-century intellectual roots provide a unique vista only partially mined by contemporary theorists frequently associated with fugitive thought. It turns next to an examination of three concepts foundational to the work of Davis: abolitionism, democracy, and freedom. Davis’s analyses of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass are vital to elucidating these notions. The chapter argues that the understanding of abolitionism Davis marshals mediates her articulations of democracy and freedom in late modernity. Inclusion of Davis’s views on resistance and liberation reinforces this reading. Davis does not claim to invent all or even most of the categories and terms integral to her thought. It is the way she integrates older and new concepts into a defined political system concerned with actors and institutional arrangements that distinguishes her. Deciphering how Davis arrives at her core tripartite ideals challenges us to refashion facile, sanitized origin narratives of the contours of African American political thought.

Democracy in today's world is synonymous with representative systems. Yet the majority of representative democracies institutionalizes mechanisms of "direct" democracy: referendums, plebiscites, citizens' initiatives, or recalls. The persistence of these institutions suggests that giving citizens the ultimate say in some matters of national public policy adds to the legitimacy of representative systems. Some recent referendum results -- the Brexit vote in the UK and the disapproval of peace accords in Colombia -- have signaled for many the risks of direct democracy. In this paper I first explore arguments in favor of limited direct agency for voters suggested by earlier theorists of representative government. I then explore the strategic reasons why real-world political leaders sometimes decide to delegate important decisions to voters. In some instances, though probably rarely, politicians decide to hold referendums for reasons that theorists would approve of.

Why does the public support or oppose military alliances? Although public backing for promises to defend other countries shapes the credibility of alliance commitments by democracies, we know little about the foundations of public opinion towards alliances. In particular, existing survey evidence cannot determine whether alliance attitudes are the top-down result of elite cues, or a bottom-up result of individual concerns and perceptions of alliance obligations and partners. In this article, I identify three potential determinants of public opinion towards alliances: elite cues, individual considerations, and alliance characteristics. I then use two conjoint survey experiments to assess the relative importance of these factors for public attitudes towards forming and maintaining international alliances.

For decades scholars have thought about the climate change problem as one that involves collective action on a global scale. That logic has animated the creation of treaties like the UN Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol that have failed spectacularly in having any real impact on the underlying problem. The Paris Agreement arrived with the great hope it would change everything; so far, its impacts have been modest too. This talk will explain what we know, as international relations scholars, about why the diagnoses of troubles with climate cooperation have not led to real solutions and where more effective strategies, building on the Paris Agreement, could be forged. It will be based partly on work done with the UK government (which hosts the next Conference of the Parties) and a forthcoming book (Princeton University Press) with Charles Sabel on Experimentalist Governance.

What are the downstream political consequences of state activity explicitly targeting an ethnic minority group? This question is well studied in the comparative context, but less is known about the effects of explicitly racist state activity in liberal democracies such as the United States. We investigate this question by looking at an important event in American history—the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We find that Japanese Americans who were interned or had family who were interned are significantly less politically engaged and that these patterns of disengagement increase with internment length. Using an identification strategy leveraging quasi-random camp assignment, we also find that camp experience matters: those who went to camps that witnessed intragroup violence or strikes experienced sharper declines, suggesting that group fragmentation is an important mechanism of disengagement. Taken together, our findings contribute to a growing literature documenting the demobilizing effects of ethnically targeted detention and expand our understanding of these forces within the U.S.

Credit card debt is increasingly common among poor and inexperienced borrowers – thus de facto a financial inclusion product. However, it remains relatively under-studied. We use detailed card-level data and a product that accounted for 15% of all first-time formal loans in Mexico and show that default rates are high and ex-ante unpredictable for new borrowers – suggesting an important role for ex-post contract terms in limiting risk. However, using a large nation-wide experiment we find that default is unresponsive to minimum payment increases, a commonly proposed policy remedy. We provide evidence that the zero result is driven by the offsetting effects of tightened liquidity constraints and lower debt burdens. Surprisingly, we also find muted default responses to large experimental changes in interest rates – suggesting a limited role for ex-post moral hazard in our context. Finally, we use job displacements to document large effects of unemployment on default, highlighting the centrality of idiosyncratic shocks as a barrier to the expansion of formal credit among poorer populations.