The following doctoral candidates are on the academic job market in 2011-2012.
Click on a student's name to access the student's page on this site.
Links to student-maintained pages on other sites may be available from
student pages on this site.
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Comparative Politics
Website: http://guygrossman.com/
Advisors: Macartan Humphreys, Tim Frye, Kimuli Kasara
Dissertation: "Essays on Leadership Selection and Public Goods Provision in Community Organizations"
Research Interests: Political Economy of Development, Public Good Provision
Biography:
I recently obtained my PhD from the Department of Political Science at Columbia University (with distinction), where I was a Graduate fellow at the Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows Program. As of August 2011, I am a post-doctoral research associate at Princeton University and a fellow at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Development Strategies. I specialize in comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. My research interests lie in exploring the relationship between governance institutions and public goods provision in low-income countries. In my work I use a host of methodological tools --- field and behavioral experiments, original survey analysis, social network analysis and formal theory --- to address substantive questions about political and economical development processes. Recently, I have been interested in studying the extent to which information technology innovations can address political accountability deficiencies at both national and local levels.
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Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~lbp2106
Advisors: Macartan Humphreys (Chair), John Huber and Timothy Frye
Dissertation: "Understanding the Resource Curse: Essays on How Revenue and Information Shape Citizen Political Behavior"
Subfield/Research Interests: Comparative politics, the political economy of development,
democratization, conflict and post-conflict reintegration, political
behavior, methods, Asian politics
Biography: I
specialize in comparative politics, with a focus on the political
economy of development and political behavior. My dissertation, which I
will defend in early 2012, consists of three essays that investigate how tax
and non-tax government revenue shape the political behavior of citizens. It is widely believed
that natural resource wealth, foreign aid, and other types of windfall revenue undermine
development. Scholars of the "resource curse" have offered many
explanations for this phenomenon, but we still know little about which mechanisms
have explanatory power, under what conditions, and how they relate to one
another. During nearly two years of fieldwork in Indonesia, I implemented two large-scale
projects to shed new light on leading explanations for the resource curse. The projects use experiments and extensive original data collection to reveal
how both incentives and information shape the political behavior of
citizens in tax and windfall environments. In addition to my
dissertation, I have ongoing projects that examine
the relationship between information and accountability, as well as the
causes of conflict and paths to post-conflict reintegration.
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Website: http://vaishnavmilan.wordpress.com/
Advisors: Maria Victoria Murillo, Devesh Kapur and Macartan Humphreys
Dissertation: "The Merits of Money and "Muscle": How Serious Criminality Affects Democracy in India"
Research Interests: corruption; criminality in politics; election finance; political economy of development; South Asia; India
Biography:
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University in New York and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow (from 2011-2012) at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. Currently, I am also an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute (GPPI) at Georgetown University.
My dissertation examines the role of money and serious criminality in
Indian electoral politics. My general areas of interest are corruption,
crime and politics, and election finance, especially in India and South
Asia. I am also involved in research on Latin America around issues of
left politics.
I hold a B.A. in International Relations from the University of
Pennsylvania and an M.A. and M.Phil in Political Science from Columbia.
Prior to Columbia, I worked at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Center
for Global Development.
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Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~bz2123/
Advisors: Pablo Pinto, Isabela Mares, Lucy Goodhart
Dissertation: "Domestic Political Institutions and the Sectoral Composition of Inward FDI in Developing Countries, 1980 - 2008"
Subfields: International Relations and Comparative Politics
Research and Teaching Interests: International/Comparative Political Economy; Foreign Direct Investment; Corruption; Chinese and East Asian Politics; Quantitative Methods and Survey Research
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International Relations
Dissertation: "The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Persists and China's Rise Is Limited"
Advisors: Richard Betts, Robert Jervis, Andrew Nathan
Subfield: International Relations, Security Studies
Biography:
Michael Beckley is a Fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University. His research focuses on the dynamics of unipolar systems, the elements of national power, and U.S. and Chinese foreign policy. Michael has published in English and Mandarin Chinese and received the International Studies Association's Carl Beck Award and the Journal of Strategic Studies' Amos Perlmutter Prize for best article of the year. In addition to his research, Michael has held positions at the RAND Corporation, the Pentagon's Policy Planning Office, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Carter Center.
Website:
www.michael-beckley.com
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Advisors: Andrew Nathan, Massimo Morelli, and Jack Snyder
Dissertation: "Peace vs. Justice: D'Amato's Code to Efficient Court Design"
Subfields and Research Interest: International Relations and International Law
Biography:
In my dissertation, I look at the problem of civil wars and how to curb violence and achieve peace during such wars. My main contribution is to provide a general setting that: (1) formalizes and clarifies, in a unified framework, the reasons for bargaining failure during civil wars and (2) is flexible enough to address the problems of optimally designing a criminal tribunal. In other words, given the particular conditions of a specific civil war, I can determine how changing the design of the tribunal affects the outcomes of the conflict. This is an important problem that has yet to be studied in depth. One of my main results is that a careful choice of the legal regime might substantially reduce the problems associated with the presence of asymmetric information in civil wars. I apply these ideas to compare the relative performance of international criminal tribunals designed according to the principles of state sovereignty, human/cosmopolitan rights, and domestic tort litigation. I give an example of a situation where the domestic tort litigation model outperforms other legal models in creating incentives for warring combatants to bargain for peace, thus lending support to a thesis proposed by Anthony D'Amato (1994) during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
I hold a B.A. in Comparative Politics from Indiana University- Bloomington, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor, and an M.Phil. in Political Science from Columbia University. I expect to obtain my Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in the Spring of 2012.
CV
Dissertation Abstract
Writing Sample
Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~rh2294/Home.html
Advisors: Page Fortna, Jack Snyder
Dissertation: "The Wartime Origins of Postwar Democratization: Civil War, Rebel Governance, and Political Regimes"
Subfields: International Relations and Comparative Politics
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Website: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/drp2109/
Advisors: Robert Jervis, Richard Betts
Dissertation: "Credibility is Not Enough: Resolve and the Effectiveness of the Unipole's Compellent Threats"
Subfield: International Relations, specializing in security studies, American foreign policy, and international coercion
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Website: http://www.columbia.edu/~bz2123/
Advisors: Pablo Pinto, Isabela Mares, Lucy Goodhart
Dissertation: "Domestic Political Institutions and the Sectoral Composition of Inward FDI in Developing Countries, 1980 - 2008"
Subfields: International Relations and Comparative Politics
Research and Teaching Interests: International/Comparative Political Economy; Foreign Direct Investment; Corruption; Chinese and East Asian Politics; Quantitative Methods and Survey Research
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Political Theory
Website: http://jeffreylenowitz.com/
Advisors: Jon Elster and Melissa Schwartzberg
Dissertation: Why Ratification? Questioning the Unexamined Constitution-making Procedure
Research
Interests: Constitutionalism and Constitution-making; Democratic
Theory; Jurisprudence; Normative Political Philosophy; Global Justice;
and History of Political Thought.
Biography:
Jeffrey Lenowitz is a doctoral candidate in Political Theory and a
Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at the Institution of Social
and Economic Research Policy. His dissertation examines the history and
effects of
ratification procedures, i.e. the submission of draft constitutions to
the
people for determinate up or down votes, and explores potential
justifications
for the procedure’s implementation. Before coming to Columbia,
Jeffrey received a BA from the University of Virginia, where he
participated in
the Political and Social Thought Honors Program.
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Website: http://post.queensu.ca/~waligore/
Advisors: Thomas Pogge and Jon Elster
Dissertation: "Cosmopolitan Right and Historical Wrong: Kantian Theory and Reparations for Indigenous Peoples"
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American Politics
Website: http://www.davidjoconnell.com/
Advisors: Ira Katznelson, Fred Harris
Dissertation: "God Wills It: Presidents and the Political Use of Religion"
Research Interests: American Political Development, The Presidency, Religion and Politics, Campaigns and Elections, Political Culture
Biography:
David O'Connell is a doctoral candidate in American politics. His
research interests vary but broadly he studies American political
development. His dissertation conceptualizes and explores the strategic
use of religious rhetoric by U.S. presidents. He has been a frequent
TA for the department's Introduction to American Politics course. A
native of Connecticut, David is a graduate of the University of
Pennsylvania. His research has previously been published in
Presidential Studies Quarterly.
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Website: www.columbia.edu/~ktr2102
Dissertation: "Mistaking the Forests for the Trees: The Mistreatment of Group-Level Treatments in the Study of American Politics"
Advisors: Jeffrey Lax, Robert Erikson, Gregory Wawro
Research interests: Judicial politics (collegiality and hierarchy in judicial
decision making); Legislative politics (distributive politics in U.S.
Congress); Political methodology (models for grouped data, causal
inference, quasi-experimental methods).
Biography:
Kelly is a Ph.D. candidate in political science
at Columbia
University, where she is also a student fellow in the Applied Statistics Center and
an ISERP
statistical consultant. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, she received
a master's degree in Quantitative Methods from Columbia and
worked at the Urban
Institute in Washington, DC. She received her B.A. in mathematical
economic analysis at Rice University.
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