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
Peasants and Parliaments: Institutional Foundations of Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth Century Eastern Europe
[Forthcoming in World Politics, vol. 78, no. 3, in July 2026]
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 contend with the diversity of property rights in preindustrial Europe, many of which, like serfdom, were obstacles to growth. I propose a role for some—but not all—early representative assemblies in fostering growth by eliminating these “bad” property rights. An assembly’s capacity to extinguish property rights is a product of what I call its decision-making efficiency, which is associated in turn with majority voting and centralized agenda control. I test these claims through a controlled comparison of pro-growth agrarian reforms in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia and the Danish-ruled duchies of Schleswig and Holstein (1795–1805), finding that the Livonian Diet’s more efficient organization was the key to the successful transformation of serfdom.
Brother against Brother, Father against Son? Elite Divisions, Serfdom, and Reform at the Livonian Diet of 1803
[Working paper]
Why did East European states abolish serfdom during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Prior explanations emphasize either political economy factors, such as the land-labor ratio and outside options for serfs, the threat of peasant rebellion, or the growing power of the state to impose its will upon the nobility. To the best of my knowledge, though, no one has sought to evaluate these rival theories on the preferences expressed by the noble landowners themselves. To fill this gap, I take advantage of a unique data source: the archived papers of the Livonian Diet of 1803. After a fierce internal debate, this assembly of noble landowners adopted a far-reaching reform of serfdom. More than 100 Diet members signed petitions or wrote letters either in defense of or in opposition to the proposed agrarian law. I correlate these signatures with data on nobles’ education, careers, landholdings, and families to make sense of the divisions within the landed elite. I find almost no evidence for any of the explanations favored by recent studies of the incidence of serfdom. In fact, the only variables which explain noble support for reform are youth, birth order, ownership of multiple manors, and service in the Livonian nobility’s elected corporative institutions. All these factors implicate longstanding social and political divisions within the landed class; in short, intra-elite divisions that predated the serfdom debate, and which originally had little to do with serfdom as such, provide the best explanation for its ultimate end.
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 and pressure from local party organizations have been all but ignored as explanations for socialist positioning vis-à-vis the war. I correct this deficit by examining the votes of Social Democratic (SPD) members of the German Reichstag on war credits in 1914–15, using newly assembled biographical, electoral, and organizational 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.