The Effect of State Capacity on Democratic Transition and the Survival of New Democracies

This dissertation investigates the effect of state capacity on the probability for democratic transition and the survival of democracies. I seek to answer these quesitons through the use of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. In my statistical models, I make use of Cox Proportional Hazard Models. These are supplemented by two case studies involving South Korea and the Philippines. My expectation, which is supported by the results presented in this study, is that higher levels of state capacity will make authoritarian regimes more stable and thus make democratic transitions less likely, but if democratic transitions take place, higher levels of state capacity will make new democratic regimes more likely to survive

Economic Liberalism in Illiberal Regimes: Authoritarian Variation and the Political Economy of Trade

Over the last few decades, a vast literature has emerged examining the relationship between democratic political institutions and trade policy outcomes. While this literature has added significantly to our knowledge, it has effectively ignored policymaking in dozens of important states—those that remain autocratic. This paper fills that hole by exploring the effects of authoritarian variation on national trade policies. Our contention is that more institutionalized authoritarian regimes will tend to adopt more open trade policies. This relationship should hold, we argue, for two distinct reasons. First, we argue that autocratic regimes with larger “selectorates” should have greater incentives to provide public rather than private goods. As a result, we expect that multiparty, and to a lesser extent single-party, autocracies will tend to prefer more open trade policies than non-party (often personalistic) dictatorships, monarchies, and military juntas. Second, we contend that more stable autocratic regimes will have longer time horizons and therefore greater incentives to adopt policies, such as trade openness, that may strengthen long-run economic performance. We find strong support for these arguments using several cross-national time-series models of all autocracies ranging from 1962 to 2007 (contingent on data availability)

A linearization account of either … or constructions

To account for the linear freedom of either in disjunction constructions, I expand upon the focus-based account of den Dikken (2006).Word order constraints, in contrast to movement rules or base-generation constraints, provide the mechanism for explaining the distributional data. I argue that all positional variability exhibited by either ultimately derives from a licensing construction that enables either to be shuffled about disjunct-internally, yet simultaneously prevents either from entering into linear precedence relations with disjunct-external constituents. Restrictions on the surface realization of either result from a linear precedence rule ordering either before the contrastive focus, language particular constraints on word order, and general constraints on coordinate ellipsis. Overall, this analysis presents an account of either . . . or constructions that introduces only a single linear precedence rule and a licensing construction for combining either with disjunctions to account for the data, relying on independently-motivated constraints to carry the rest of the analytical burden