PI: Manuel Cabal, Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500,Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Civic Education Fund
Project Abstract: I specialize in comparative politics with a regional focus on Latin America. My research interests are in state-building, authoritarianism, and the political economy of development. Methodologically, I combine comparative-historical approaches with quantitative data analysis. My research asks when and how state institutions emerge and why they persist for long periods, using insights from the research tradition on historical institutionalism. I am especially interested in state institutions to provide public goods that foster economic development, such as public education and other human services.
My book project addresses a comparative politics puzzle: revolutionary regimes are among the most durable autocracies despite seldom having capable state organizations. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, I argue that revolutions do not provide by themselves the conditions conducive to building “state capacity,” as they are prone to elite factionalism and state-society conflict. Through the study of the geography of public education access after the Mexican Revolution, I highlight an understudied source of institutional dysfunctionality: the strength of territorially-based interests and identities.
More broadly, my research agenda leverages diverse aspects of public education to investigate the construction and consolidation of authoritarian states. I also study the different channels through which the economic elites in unequal societies, such as Latin America, shape public policy and institutions.