Please click on the + next to candidate names for bio & dissertation information.
First Name | Last Name | Contact Info | Subfield | Bio | Dissertation Title | Research Interests | Teaching Interests | Dissertation Summary | Personal Website Address |
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Stephen | Cucharo | scucharo@ucla.edu | Modern Political Thought, Contemporary Political Thought, Critical Theory, Fascism, Marx and Marxism | I am currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. I hold an MA in Politics from The New School for Social Research, an MS in Global Affairs from New York University, and a BA in Political Science from Fordham University. My work has appeared in Contemporary Political Theory and is forthcoming in parallax. I am also an assistant editor for the journal Political Theory. My research interests include modern political thought, psychoanalysis and politics, critical theory, fascism, theories of responsibility, Marx and Marxism, and pessimism. | “Guilt and the Modern Subject: Lawfulness, Solidarity, and Action” | My current research explores how modern and contemporary thinkers make sense of certain forms of human suffering. More specifically, I address the question of how theorists explain the origins, anatomy, and behaviors characteristic of the “negative” emotions (guilt, despair, paranoia, etc), exploring how these emotions function politically. | I have been the lead instructor for eight political theory courses on fascism, violence in modern thought, Marx and Marxism, and the War on Terror. I have broad teaching interests within modern and contemporary political theory at introductory or advanced levels with emphasis on the 20th century continental tradition. | What is guilt and what role should it play in politics? This dissertation challenges the Freudian conception of guilt that is a commonplace of contemporary political theory, where it is associated with obedience and self-abasement, written off as a hindrance to political engagement. Political theorists have therefore neglected alternative framings of guilt that cast it as a potentially productive, solidaristic state that attunes subjects to their implication in the suffering of others. The foundational categories of this alternative perspective, pioneered by Melanie Klein, regard guilt-feelings as expressions of value, suggesting potentially productive forms of guilt that are actualized in different ways. In other words, guilt is not necessarily paralyzing or subordinating if we mobilize it in the right way. Two central figures of twentieth century political thought, John Rawls and Theodor Adorno, offer underappreciated politicized readings of the categories developed by Klein. Though Rawls and Adorno are not straightforwardly applying Klein’s work, they reject the Freudian paradigm and craft reparative responses to guilt. These differing processes of emotional script writing show how guilt can yet make a productive contribution to contemporary politics. The dissertation concludes by sketching the promises and pitfalls of the liberal and critical approaches towards the phenomenon of “white guilt”. | https://stephencucharo.wordpress.com/ |
Julian | Michel | julianmichel@ucla.edu | Comparative Politics; Political Economy; Quantitative Methods | I study Comparative Politics with an emphasis on contemporary challenges to democracy. My dissertation investigates how opposition parties leverage subnational incumbency during national-level contestation over regime type. Additionally, I co-led experiments surrounding a major city-wide tax reform in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We show how inclusive state capacity building increased support for elected leaders. Finally, I study how exit opportunities affected domestic pressures for regime change in Hong Kong and the German Democratic Republic. Before coming to UCLA, I graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from Heidelberg University, Germany, and was a visiting graduate student at Yale. | I study Comparative Politics with an emphasis on contemporary challenges to democracy. My dissertation investigates how opposition parties leverage subnational incumbency during national-level contestation over regime type. Additionally, I co-led experiments surrounding a major city-wide tax reform in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We show how inclusive state capacity building increased support for elected leaders. Finally, I study how exit opportunities affected domestic pressures for regime change in Hong Kong and the German Democratic Republic. Before coming to UCLA, I graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from Heidelberg University, Germany, and was a visiting graduate student at Yale. | I combine ambitious data collections with experimental methods to study democratic stability from a comparative perspective. More specifically, my research explores how regime trajectories are affected by (1) opposition control over subnational executive offices; (2) opportunities for pro-democratic citizens to emigrate; and (3) incumbents’ efforts to increase state capacity. | I would particularly enjoy teaching any of the following classes, either at the undergraduate or graduate levels: Intro to Comparative Politics, Intro to Data Science, World Politics, Democratization, Democratic Erosion, Political Economy of Development, Causal Inference, Research Design, and Comparative Subnational Politics. | My dissertation investigates why some democracies are more vulnerable than others to democratic backsliding led by elected leaders. Whereas democracies used to die in coups, they are now much more likely to be weakened by democratically elected leaders themselves. What explains variation in such executive aggrandizement? The conventional view sees central executives as constrained by strong oppositions utilizing horizontal checks and balances. I argue that this ignores the vital role played by opposition access to subnational tiers of government. The vast majority of democracies—more than 89% of country-years since 1990—have elected governors and/ or mayors. Opposition parties can use such office, and the access to state resources and political visibility it provides, to: (a) become more electorally competitive, (b) select institutional over extra-institutional strategies, and (c) ultimately better preserve liberal democracy. Analyzing newly assembled data on gubernatorial and mayoral elections in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1990, and using a regression discontinuity design for causal leverage, I find that subnational opposition incumbency increases the local opposition vote in national lower house elections by 17 percentage points. Additionally, I collected data on subnational election outcomes in 86 out of 106 politically decentralized democracies after 1990. Panel analyses reveal that opposition parties are more able to preserve horizontal constraints on the national executive the more subnational office they won. Pro-democracy mass mobilization, however, becomes rarer as opposition control increases. Overall, this dissertation provides novel evidence that patterns of subnational control under democracy shape how much and through which strategies opposition parties constrain the national executive. | https://julianmichel.net/ |
Nicholas | Muench | nmuench@ucla.edu | Comparative Political Theory; Islamic Political Thought; History of Political Thought | I am a PhD candidate in political theory at UCLA. I study comparative political theory, and my specialization is in Islamic political thought. My field paper was awarded the Swarr Prize for best paper in UCLA’s political science department, and I received a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship to support nine months of archival work in Morocco and Spain. This year, I will be a research fellow at UCLA’s Clark Library, where I will study early modern European translations of texts from the Islamic world. | Literary Permutations of Islam in Moments of Political Crisis | I study in the movement of ideas and political concepts across borders. I am interested in themes and topics such as comparative political theory, pluralism, multiculturalism, and literature and politics. My research is highly interdisciplinary and draws from a variety of fields including Islamic studies, Arabic, and comparative literature. | I can teach broadly within political theory, from introductory courses to advanced seminars on specific more topics. I am particularly interested in teaching courses on the early modern period, comparative political theory, and Islamic political thought. Outside of political theory, I am prepared to teach courses in international law. | My dissertation considers the way that ideas permeate and cross political, cultural, and intellectual boundaries in moments of crisis, and in doing so demonstrate the porousness of boundaries and categories like national or religious identity that at first glance seem to be impenetrable and hermetically sealed. I examine three such moments, focusing on the ways that three Muslim intellectuals respond in their writings. First, I focus on the 11th-century Persian mystic/theologian al-Ghazali, who wrote during a period of instability after the Abbasid Caliphate was overrun by the Saljuq dynasty. Second, I turn to a work by an anonymous 16th-century Spanish “crypto-Muslim” who was forcibly converted to Christianity and wrote using aljamiado, or Spanish written with Arabic script. Finally, I place an account of Paris written by al-Tahtawi, a 19th-century Egyptian thinker, in the context of the growing threat of European colonialism in north Africa. Each chapter takes as a conceptual fulcrum a different linguistic or literary concept through which these new ideas are refracted. In doing so, they pinpoint how these thinkers conceive of Islam and its relation to the non-Muslim world in new and unique ways using the discursive techniques that they have at their disposal. In their writing, each thinker uses a slightly different linguistic strategy to reframe ideas originating outside the borders of Islam to make them fit within the political and religious framework of the Islamic world. In all three of these moments, borders thought to be firm are in fact porous and accommodating. | https://nicholasxmuench.com/ |
Monica | Widmann | mw4920@princeton.edu | International Political Economy, Comparative Political Economy, Quantitative Methods | Domesticating the International: The Uneven Enforcement of Investors’ Preferences and its Unintended Consequences | Using original data sets, my research examines the dynamics of sovereign debt politics and the usage of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Findings reveal differences in judges' rulings based on political ideology and economic implications of court rulings on defaulting countries, such as lower borrowing costs and economic growth. | I am capable and interested in teaching the following at any level: IPE, CPE, International Law & Organizations, Middle East Politics, US Foreign Policy, Intro to International Relations, Intro to Comparative Politics, Research Design, Intro Stats, Text Analysis, Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning, Causal Inference, and Web Scraping. | My dissertation turned book project focuses on the dynamics of sovereign debt politics and the development and usage of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). What can foreign creditors do to a sovereign country that does not repay its debts? I argue that US courts are a critical tool in managing sovereign debt markets and in influencing investors’ decision to invest. The first chapter examines the era before the advent of the FSIA and finds that US judges were more likely to grant sovereign immunity to democracies and in cases involving sovereign debt. The second chapter delves into the utilization of the FSIA. This statute was designed not only to de-politicize the process of sovereign litigation, but also to establish a definition of what constitutes "commercial," which, under this act, would include sovereign debt. Nevertheless, I find that conservative judges are more likely to rule against defendants who are democracies than their liberal counterparts. Given that US judges are making decisions on cases that could require a state to repay its creditors, what economic implications do these judicial decisions carry? Addressing this question, the final chapter of the dissertation finds that a ruling in favor of the plaintiff alleviates investors’ fears regarding a country that has defaulted. This reduction in investor fears leads to lower borrowing costs, increased trade imports, and economic growth. For this dissertation, I collected three new data sets covering a time frame from 1811 until March 2022 that provide detailed information on sovereign litigation cases. | https://monicawidmann.github.io/ | |
Kevin | Grieco | kgrieco@ucla.edu | Comparative Politics, Political Economy of Development, African Politics | I study the political economy of development, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. I am a PhD Candidate in political science at UCLA where I am currently a 2023 Keck Graduate Fellow. I will be a predoctoral fellow at the Local Government Revenue Initiative starting in September 2023. I was a 2021-2022 C. Lowell Harris Dissertation Fellow and I received the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. My research has been supported by the International Growth Centre and the International Centre for Tax and Development. I hold an MSc from Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and a BA from the University of New Hampshire. | "Building Fiscal Capacity through Collaboration with Traditional Authorities: Experimental and Qualitative Evidence from Sierra Leone" | I study how low-capacity governments raise taxes and enforce policies. My current work focuses on fiscal capacity and traditional political institutions in Sierra Leone (where I have spent over three years living and working), collects original quantitative and qualitative data, uses field experiments to answer causal questions, and involves collaborations with local government and civil society partners. | I am prepared to teach courses in comparative politics and political economy of development as well as introductory courses on research design, experimental design, or quantitative methods. I welcome the opportunity to develop and teach specialized courses related to my interests in, for example, African politics or state-building. | How can weak states build fiscal capacity? I argue that governments in weak states can build fiscal capacity by collaborating with non-state, traditional political institutions (TPIs). Using a mix of experimental and qualitative evidence, I show that this collaboration increases citizens' compliance because traditional political institutions possess legitimacy and coercive capacity. Collaborating with the local government in Kono District, Sierra Leone, I embedded an experiment in their campaign to collect property taxes. Potential taxpayers were shown awareness videos that varied in their content, principally whether and how their local Paramount Chief characterized his involvement in tax collection. I find that state collaboration with TPIs increases citizens’ compliance with a newly introduced property tax and that TPIs’ authority stems from both their legitimacy and coercive capacity. Qualitative evidence from 300 semi-structured interviews adds a richer description of legitimacy and coercive capacity in my context. I argue, based on qualitative evidence, that legitimacy and coercion are complementary mechanisms of TPIs’ authority enabling them to effectively enforce laws that have broad public support and are seen as socially beneficial. | https://kevingrieco.net/ |
Bianca | Vicuña | bvicuna95@g.ucla.edu | REP, American Politics, and Methods | Bianca Vicuña is a PhD Candidate at the UCLA. In 2018, Bianca graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BSA in Neuroscience (Honors). In 2021, she obtained a MA in Political Science from UCLA. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. | Intersectional Politics? How Women Negotiate Their Identities and Why it Matters Politically | My research lies at the intersection of political psychology and intergroup relations. Using survey experiments, I study the psychological mechanisms that facilitate the development of political attitudes and the political engagement of minoritized groups (e.g., racial minorities and women). | I am interested in teaching substantive courses on political psychology, racial and ethnic politics, gender politics, and intergroup relations. I am also prepared to teach methods courses on research design, survey design, and experimental methods. | Women’s movements in the U.S. are often marked by tensions between women of color (WoC) and White women. Previous work has neglected to isolate and evaluate the psychological mechanisms facilitating cooperation between women from distinct racial groups. I argue that diversity management strategies that recognize the intersecting effects of race and gender on women’s lived experiences increase interest in interracial coalitions between Latinas and White women. To explore this argument in my dissertation, I employ a mixed methods approach with two survey experiments and semi-structured interviews. Study 1 shows that Latinas and White women who strongly believe in the importance of understanding the intersecting effects of race and gender tend to support feminist policies that benefit women from a racial outgroup at higher rates. Study 2 finds that organizations that use a multicultural narrative without having descriptive representation of minorities risk lowering interest in interracial coalitions expressed by Latinas. The in-depth interviews contextualize these findings. | https://bvicuna.com/ |
Kevin | Gatter | kevin.gatter7@gmail.com | Comparative Politics, Quantitative Methods, International Relations, Race Ethnicity and Politics | Prior to his PhD studies at UCLA, Kevin worked in diverse fields in Washington, D.C., including international development, international education, and legal aid for migrant workers. He received his MA and BA in International Studies from American University. As part of his PhD studies, Kevin has conducted fieldwork in 8 regions with currently or recently active secessionist movements across Europe and North America. He has also worked with the McNair Scholars Program to mentor undergraduate students from traditionally underrepresented groups on conducting research and preparing to apply for graduate school. | “Identity or the Economy? Drivers of Secessionism in Comparative Perspective” | My research interests are in territorial politics, nationalism, secessionism, and decolonization. I am interested in understanding what motivates the emergence of secessionist movements and why individuals choose to support or oppose secession. I am also interested in how experiences during civil conflict affect support for secession. | I am interested in teaching courses on nationalism, territorial politics, and comparative politics. I have extensive experience teaching courses on research design, including quantitative and qualitative methods. I am also interested in teaching students about how to conduct fieldwork as part of their research projects and how to navigate academia. | My dissertation explores the role of cultural and economic factors in catalyzing the emergence of secessionist movements, motivating elites’ selection of pro-secession arguments, and sustaining popular support for secession. I argue that the effect of each type of factor depends on a region’s cultural demography and relative wealth. In my first chapter, I use an original dataset outlining the universe of potentially secessionist social groups in Europe and the former Soviet Union to mitigate the selection bias that has bedeviled many studies of the determinants of secessionist emergence. I find that secessionist movements are most likely to emerge in wealthy regions and among social groups facing threats to their cultural identity. In my second chapter, I draw on interviews that I conducted with secessionist elites in 8 regions across North America and Europe to show that elites employ primarily economic arguments in favor of secession in relatively wealthy regions but tend to rely on identity-based arguments in relatively poor regions. In my final chapter, I use survey data to compare the bases of popular support for secession across secessionist regions with varying levels of relative wealth and cultural difference, focusing on Catalonia, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. I show that support for secession is concentrated primarily among titular minorities in culturally distinct regions but has broader cross-ethnic support in culturally similar regions. In relatively poor regions, support for secession is concentrated among higher socioeconomic levels, whereas in relatively wealthy regions, socioeconomic support for secession is more diverse. | https://kevingatter.wixsite.com/kevingatter/ |
Chase | Privett | chaseprivett4@gmail.com | American Politics, Political Psychology, Quantitative Methods, Race and Ethnicity Politics | Chase Privett is a Ph.D. candidate studying political science at UCLA. Hailing from Bakersfield, CA, Chase attended UCLA as an undergraduate student and loved it so much that he came back for graduate school. His research interests are focused on American politics and political psychology, with an emphasis on generational groups and when they become politically consequential. During his free time, you can find Chase rooting for the LA Dodgers and going to the theater to check out the newest musical rolling into town. | “Age-Old Divisions: How Generational Identities Become Political Groups” | My research focuses on social identities in American politics and how those identities have political implications. I study generational groups (e.g., Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z) as identities, including how much Americans identify with their generation and whether that identity has impacts on various political attitudes and behaviors. | I am interested in teaching courses focused broadly on American politics and political psychology. I am excited to teach substantive courses (political psychology, American political institutions) as well as methodological courses (game theory, data analysis). I look forward to offering courses at the introductory, upper division, and graduate level. | This dissertation formulates a new theory about how social identities become politically relevant over time. Focusing on generations as social categories (e.g., Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z), I examine how, when, and among whom generational identities become politically consequential. Using a mixed-methods approach, I illuminate the evolution of generational identity and its most important predictors as well as investigate whether and when generational identities have measurable political effects. Notably, I use two novel survey experiments to investigate whether people will increase in the strength of their generational identity when faced with a threatening cue against their generational group and measure if that threat spurs changes to political attitudes toward age-based policies. Study 1 shows that exposure to a treatment threatening one’s personal generational identity is associated with an increase in support for within-generation policies (Social Security, Student Loan Forgiveness). Likewise, Study 2 shows that exposure to information threatening one’s generational in-group correlates with increased support for public policies. These patterns are mediated by a sense of solidarity and similarity in the generational group and show stronger associations on more salient public policies. | https://chaseprivett.com/ |
Anthony | Norton | adnorton266@ucla.edu | Political Theory, International Relations, Global and Transnational Studies, Critical Human Rights Studies | Anthony Dean Norton is a Ph.D. Candidate in the UCLA Department of Political Science whose research addresses the intellectual, political, and legal history of peoples' right to self-determination. My dissertation “Beyond Right and Recognition: Toward a History of Collective Self-Determination as the Authorship of Political Personhood” traces the intellectual evolution of collective self-determination from the nationalist revolutions of the mid-19th century to present articulations of minority and indigenous rights, demonstrating the emergence of new iterations of collective self-determination that expanded to whom and to what the notion applied. Anthony also holds an MA in Philosophy from Brandeis University and BA (Hons) degrees in Government and Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. | “Beyond Right and Recognition: Toward a History of Collective Self-Determination as the Authorship of Political Personhood” | Collective Self-Determination, History of Political Thought, Theory and History of Human Rights, Minority and Indigenous Rights, Colonial and Anticolonial Thought, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism, Critical International Legal Studies | At UCLA I have served as the lead instructor for seven original courses including “Theories of Human Rights,” “Introduction to Political Theory,” “Decolonization and International Law,” and “Utopian Thought.” My other teaching interests include Global Justice, Nationalism & Cosmopolitanism, Ancient & Modern Political Theory, Democratic Theory, and International Relations Theory. | My dissertation “Beyond Right and Recognition: Toward a History of Collective Self-Determination as the Authorship of Political Personhood” traces the political and intellectual evolution of collective self-determination through the emergence of novel interpretations of the concept. Through historical research and theoretical inquiry, I provide an account of the development of discourse of self-determination through the varying sources of authority that endeavored to shape the political identity of emerging “peoples.” My account unfolds across pivotal junctures in the political and intellectual history of self-determination: from the struggles of nations seeking statehood in the context of European empire to the interventions of international organizations in delimiting the boundaries of peoples and states, the codification of peoples' rights within 20th-century international law, and the self-assertion of minority and indigenous groups within existing states. I explain how these turning points have contributed to the creation of our understanding of political, legal, and moral significance of the concept. I contend that the proliferation of applications of the notion of “self-determination” coincided with the sedimentation of earlier interpretations. This phenomenon has engendered conflicts among states, nations, and minority groups, each articulating coherent yet incompatible claims to autonomy as a means of realizing their own self-determination. Despite the contemporary challenges posed by this plurality of articulations, I defend an indeterminate understanding of the entitlements of the right to self-determination and the "peoples" to which it may apply. This intentional ambiguity ensures that ongoing debates over the right continue to proffer a generative framework for autonomy claim-making among diverse types of political collectives and peoples. | http://anthonydeannorton.com/ |
First Name | Last Name | Contact Info | Subfield | Bio | Dissertation Title | Research Interests | Teaching Interests | Dissertation Summary | Personal Website Address |