Note: There isn’t a response paper topic for Week 1.
Week 2: The State
- Pick a country. Does this country have a weak state or a strong state? Which of the arguments you encountered in the readings explains why the state is strong or weak?
Week 3: Social Structure, Classes, and Political Regimes
- Does democracy depend upon a particular class structure? If so, which one?
Week 4: The Role of Culture (in Democracy, Corruption, Growth, etc.)
- Assume that, as an empirical matter, Islamic countries are less likely to be democracies than other countries that appear to share similar characteristics. (In other words, assume that the sign on a variable “percentage of the population that is Muslim” or “majority Muslim country” is statistically significant and non-trivial in magnitude in a cross-sectional regression, in which the dependent variable is Polity IV score, and that this association holds both in the bivariate case and when the control variables like level of economic development, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, literacy, region, percentage of GDP from hydrocarbons, etc. are included in the model.) Is “Islamic culture” responsible for this difference?
Week 5: Leadership
- Under what circumstances do rulers “matter”?
Week 6: Constitutional Choices and Governmental Performance
- What would happen if the United States adopted a proportional representation electoral system tomorrow? (If you want to write on some equally significant change in another country, have at it.)
Week 7: Parties, Party Systems, and Electoral Behavior
- Over the last four decades, there have been many critiques of Downs’s spatial model of voting, but no one framework has supplanted it. What alternatives can you think of to the spatial model? How could you tell if your preferred model was superior?
Week 8: Clientelism and Patronage Politics
- Absurdistan’s National Election Agency (essentially a fourth branch of government in charge of supervising and administering elections) is run by a former MIT grad who has hired you as a consultant to recommend ways to prevent clientelism in elections. What do you expect to find in Absurdistan’s elections? What would you suggest the National Election Agency do about it?
Week 9: Modernization and Development
- Over the last 200 years, human societies have seen a staggering change in living standards and health outcomes, the commercialization of agriculture and disappearance of closed corporate villages, tremendous migration to from the countryside and urbanization, dramatic increases in literacy, and the spread of mass media—interrelated and highly co-linear trends often grouped under the rubric “modernization” or “development.” What are the main political consequences of this transformation?
Week 10: Nationalism and National Identity
Option #1 (N = 1–4 people)
- Lurking somewhere in Anderson’s book is a testable claim about linguistic differences, the printing press, and the emergence of nationalism. He does not really present any tests himself, but you can. Specifically, for this class project, you should:
- Articulate what you see as Anderson’s core claim about the role of “print-capitalism,” or some other interesting argument he makes;
- Identify a number of observable implications of that claim;
- Select the one(s) that seem(s) most efficiently tested;
- Identify the data necessary to conduct your tests—for example, categorization of language families, timing of the emergence of the moveable type in different countries, likely geographic ranges for publications, measures of your outcome (presumably, manifestations of nationalism or lack thereof), etc.;
- Collect the data;
- Run the requisite analyses; and
- Write up your key findings.
- You will presumably need to brainstorm a good deal about the theoretical side. However, I want to make sure that you perform at least one clean, compelling empirical test. Given time constraints, this means that you will want to look for as simple as possible a test of Anderson’s core claim—a task that will likely require some cleverness.
- I will happily point you to specific datasets or ideas for tests.
Option #2
- Pretend that you are acting as referee for a journal and write up a peer-review report of the Darden and Grzymala-Busse (2006) article (or the Yannick et al. 2022 article).
- As background, a referee’s report normally contains the following elements: (1) an overall assessment; (2) a brief summary of the authors’ arguments, to prove that the reviewer understands them; (3) a mention of the article’s strong points; and (4) a critique of its weak points. In practice, as you may discover in the future, (3) is sometimes omitted.
- Assessments typically take one of four forms: reject, revise and resubmit (with no guarantee of ultimate acceptance), a favorable revise and resubmit, or publish as is. In practice, very few articles receive a “publish as is.” Assessments are normally conservative, in order to encourage authors to submit their best work the first time around. Thus, an article that has significant problems would normally receive a rejection, even if these problems are potentially fixable.
- Be sure in your review to discuss how this article related to other work on nationalism (including a dive into Anderson).
Week 11: Colonial Legacies
- Missionaries, property rights regimes, tutelary elections, or none of the above?
Week 12: Street-Level Bureaucracy
- The World Bank has hired you to recommend ways to reduce corruption, absenteeism, and poor service delivery in rural health clinics in the Kyrgyz Republic. Assuming that you find what you would expect to find after leaving Bishkek—empty shelves where pharmaceuticals and bandages should be, hospital workers charging patients for clean syringes, rampant absenteeism, ghost employees whose salaries are collected by their superiors, poorly trained and unmotivated staff, etc.—what would you recommend be done? (If you wish to address a similar scenario in a different country, feel free to do so.)
Week 13: Political Institutions and Economic Growth
- What sort of political institutions are most likely to promote economic growth?
