The Emergence and Consolidation of Opposition to Authoritarian Rule
Book Summary:
In anticipation and in response to popular unrest dictators often redouble their efforts to crack down on dissent. Despite these difficult circumstances, citizens manage to organize and even sustain mobilization. To mobilize, civil society organizations must form alliances, as there is rarely a single group in society that can support ongoing protest by millions of people. Therefore, coalition-building is at the core of transitioning from onset to sustained mobilization. This book develops the logic of alliance formation among civil society organizations in repressive contexts. It argues that a civil society organization weighs two competing factors when deciding to join an alliance: the opportunity to increase the likelihood of political success against the risk of increasing violent repression.
The Construction of Quantitative Evidence in Political Science: A Turn to Practice
(with P. M. Aronow, Tommaso Bardelli, Josh Kalla, and Hilton Simmet)
Book under contract with Cambridge University Press
Book Summary:
Political science is a massive and diverse field. It is concerned with understanding the institutions and behaviors that constitute public life and the practices of government. The field is increasingly concerned with its ‘scientific’ aspect, borrowing tools and methods developed in the natural (and especially medical and biological) sciences. This turn has directed our attention to transparency. Transparency is a particular problem for political science because of the breadth and diversity of the discipline. Even within subfields with seemingly strong research norms, these norms may not be as strong as they appear and are hard to enforce. This project identifies the current status of transparency in quantitative political science and challenges the discipline to do better by identifying what can be done to improve its standards. In order to improve the discipline we believe we must first examine political science in practice.