My Research
I study a broad range of issues in the political economy of development, with my main area of interest at present being the impact of representative institutions on state capacity and economic growth. My work is deeply informed by recent historical scholarship on state formation, representation, absolutism, noble power, and agrarian society in early modern Europe and seeks to integrate the latest historiographical developments into comparative politics and political economy research.
Book Project
Peasants and Parliaments: Agrarian Reform in Later Eighteenth Century Europe
My book project examines the politics of agrarian reform—here meaning state intervention in the relationship between manorial lords and their subject farmers—in Central and Eastern Europe during the late eighteenth century, seeking to explain why some states were so much more successful than others in enlisting the support of established elites and corporate groups for agricultural “modernization” and other development goals. The empirical core of the book is a controlled comparison of agrarian reform processes and outcomes in the Russian province of Livonia and the Danish-ruled duchies of Schleswig and Holstein between 1795 and 1805, but individual chapters venture beyond the Baltic littoral to explore the implementation of labor service contracts in Prussian Silesia during the 1780s and 1790s. The book’s findings, based on archival research carried out in Estonia, Germany, Latvia, and Russia, challenge prevailing theories of European state formation and the relationship of representative institutions to development.
Share of villages with confirmed labor service contracts, by district, Prussian Silesia, 1807.
Working Papers and Articles under Review
Representation and Property Rights in Preindustrial Europe Revisited
[Under review at World Politics]
An influential literature attributes Europe’s economic precocity to “good” political institutions, such as representative assemblies, which shielded property from governmental predation. This analysis fails to account for the diversity of property rights in preindustrial Europe, many of which, such as serfdom, were obstacles to growth. Theories of development must be able to explain how European states eliminated these “bad” property rights despite constraints on the sovereign's authority to do so. I propose a role for some—but not all—representative assemblies in overcoming this developmental hurdle. An assembly’s capacity to extinguish property rights is a product of what I call its decision-making efficiency, which, in turn, is associated with majority voting and centralized agenda control. I test these claims through a controlled comparison of agrarian reforms in Livonia and Schleswig-Holstein (1795–1805). In terms of their developmental contribution, my findings suggest, early representative institutions must be evaluated on the basis of their capacity not only to constrain the sovereign but also to support complex exchanges of property rights.
Serfowners against Serfdom: Elite Divisions and Agrarian Reform at the Livonian Diet of 1803
[Working paper]
What explains variation in the incidence of serfdom, slavery, and other coercive labor market institutions? Predictions about landowner preferences can be derived from both classic and recent political economy models of labor coercion, but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has tested these predictions on individual-level data. I make good this oversight, using signatures on petitions to measure the expressed preferences of some 100 members of the Livonian Diet of 1803. This assembly of noble landowners adopted a package of agrarian reforms whose effect was to transform serfdom into a considerably milder form of peasant subordination, a crucial first step toward emancipation. Combining the petitions with data on individual service records, landownership, education, and family ties, I test the prevailing explanations for labor coercion and its abolition found in the literature—including revolutionary threat, the land-labor ratio, and outside options for farm laborers—and find little support for any of them.
Peasant revolts in Russian Livonia, by parish, 1783.
Who Voted for the Guns of August? Explaining Socialist Support for War in 1914
[Working paper]
Why did socialist parties across Europe abandon their internationalist principles and vote for war in August 1914? What can account for variation—across countries and within national parties—in socialist support for the war effort at the outbreak of the First World War? A vast historical and polemical literature has sought to answer these questions, typically in the larger context of tracing the origins of “opportunist,” nationalist, and reformist currents within the Second International. The most prominent approach, associated with Robert Michels, attributes the emergence of conservative forces within the socialist movement to the growth of permanent party and trade union bureaucracies. Meanwhile, electoral incentives have been all but ignored as an explanation for socialist positioning vis-à-vis the war. I correct this deficit by examining the votes of Social Democratic members of the German Reichstag on war credits in 1914–15, using newly assembled biographical and electoral data to identify the correlates of opposition to the war.
Vorwärts, the German Social Democratic newspaper, announces the parliamentary delegation’s vote in favor of war credits on August 4, 1914.