2020-2021 Seminar Series

Partisans --- voters who feel closer to one party over the other --- rarely vote for opposition party candidates. In contrast to existing work, I argue that two critical constituency-level factors jointly shape a partisan's likelihood of voting for a candidate from the other party when desirous of more public infrastructure. The first is partisan geography: partisans have an incentive to vote for a similar or better opposition politician when they live side by side with her supporters in a community (i.e., partisan nonsegregated areas) because politicians cannot exclude them from the provided benefits. Second, voters only have an incentive to cross party lines in competitive electoral districts because their vote can be pivotal in selecting and sanctioning an opposition politician. In other electoral settings, partisans have few incentives to vote for opponents because they either do not expect to benefit from the goods they will provide or believe that their vote is not essential (or both). I find support for my hypothesis and proposed explanation using data from a conjoint experiment alongside survey responses of citizens (N=2,020) located in a stratified, representative sample of electoral districts in Ghana.

In contemporary Latin America roughly one-third of all democratically-elected leaders are prosecuted by their successors for corruption after leaving office. Drawing on a simple reciprocity game, we argue that upending impunity depends more on the predecessors’ capacity for retaliation than on conventional rule of law considerations, or on the successors’ desire to use the law opportunistically to weed out future political competitors. We then exploit an original dataset on extended post-tenure fates to show that presidential prosecutions in Latin America correlate with two types of political shocks: irregular presidential exits and the election of political outsiders. Such relationships remain robust whether the successor is from an opposition party, the courts enjoy independence, or previous leaders were especially corrupt. To explore whether the correlates of selective accountability that we uncover are causal, we instrument for domestic political shocks with an index of international commodity prices and U.S. interest rates.

In a political climate in which immigrants are often told to “go back where you came from,” this paper explores the intersections of race, immigration, and belonging in North America. It juxtaposes my deep, ancestral connections to Black America and with a parallel but at times competing national affinity with the land to which many enslaved Black Americans once fled: Canada. Using the analytical insights of black political thought, I use personal narrative to explore the boundaries of racial belonging; to identify key facets of Canadian ideas about race and racism, including the intersection of racial formations and settler colonialism; to analyze the transnational nuances and contours of the African diaspora in North America; and ultimately, to think through what it means to be in a place, but not be of that place. Tethering territorial and temporal boundaries to our contemporary understandings of race, the paper seeks to both reconsider and recalibrate ideas of home, belonging, diaspora, and the meaning of democracy. Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. Her award-winning book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. She is currently writing two book projects: the first explores the transnational dynamics of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the second, co-authored with Keith Banting (Queen’s University) analyzes the puzzling persistence of racial inequality in Canada.

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.