Ralf Bader

University of St Andrews
Philosophy

“The Legacy of Robert Nozick”

I am currently in the process of writing a book on Robert Nozick for the Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series published by Continuum Press. The book aims to provide a comprehensive account of Nozick’s political philosophy. The series consists of relatively short books that all have a common format, consisting of four chapters: (i) biography, (ii) critical exposition, (iii) reception and influence, and (iv) relevance. During the Summer Graduate Research Fellowship I will write the last two book chapters. Together, these two chapters constitute an assessment of Nozick’s impact on and significance for political philosophy. I will examine the way in which Anarchy, State, and Utopia was received, by giving an account of which aspects of the Nozickian project have been accepted, criticized or neglected. I will then assess the relevance of Nozick’s political philosophy by determining which of his key arguments and positions have been shown to be problematic and which are still viable. 

Jean-Paul Carvalho

University of Oxford
Economics

“Why Does Secularization Fail? Modernization, Polarization and the Islamic Revival”

My thesis consists of an ensemble of analytic narratives that explain various aspects of the Islamic revival. An `analytic narrative' is a mathematical model motivated by and tested against accompanying historical and ethnographic narratives. While Islam has a tradition of revival, I study how Muslims have shaped the contemporary Islamic revival using Islamic symbols and principles in response to the social and economic conditions they face. I stress the role of cultural globalization and limited access to economic and political opportunities in Muslim societies. This paper provides explanations for both forms of social polarization. In doing so, I integrate concepts from psychology and sociology into a social dynamics framework. The field of behavioral economics has produced a range of models that explain human behavior based on various aspects of individual psychology. But these models rarely explore the way in which individual psychology is influenced by emergent social norms and the beliefs of other agents. I study the social dynamics of religiosity among agents who are subject to self-control problems as well as social influence.   

Yvonne Chiu

University of California, Berkeley
Political Science

"Post-War Purging of the Military”

This summer, I will revise a dissertation chapter, “Post-War Purging of the Military,” for publication as a separate article. In the aftermath of any regime-changing war, one of the most difficult and complicated tasks for a new government and society is whether and how to purge the remnants of the former regime. The mission of lustrace, a ritualistic cleansing, is to rid the state’s institutions of dangerous, corrupt, or culpable elements, and it serves both symbolic and practical purposes. Various types of lustration have been tried, such as truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa and German denazification after WWII. Lustrating the military requires special consideration because of its particular capacities and its unique role in providing physical security for a country and helping to secure genuine sovereignty. 

Daniel D'Amico

George Mason University
Economics

“The Use of Knowledge in Proportionate Punishment”

Christopher Freiman

University of Arizona
Philosophy

“Deontological Emotions and Consequentialism”

During the SuRF fellowship, I plan to finish a chapter of my dissertation and prepare it for publication. The paper is tentatively titled “More Rational Than Reason: How Deontological Emotions Can Save Consequentialism From Itself.” I discuss the recent experimental work of Joshua Greene and others, which suggests that our deontological intuitions are the product of a morally arbitrary evolutionary process. Greene argues that these intuitions are essentially affective heuristics suitable to the adaptive challenges of our hunter-gather ancestors, but not the subtleties of complex moral decision making. Our moral reasoning, in contrast, is distinctively consequentialist.
This paper will constitute one of the core parts of my dissertation. The dissertation focuses on moral psychology and its relationship to moral and political philosophy. In brief, I argue that contrary to appearances (and perhaps prevailing opinion) an empirically reputable account of moral psychology does not have radically revisionary implications; indeed, such an account is ultimately vindicatory, as it enables us to supply new and better credentials for canonical conceptions of virtue, deontic constraints, and distributive justice.

Anil G.C.

Columbia University
Political Science

“Left-Libertarian Canons Revisited: State of Nature, Property Rights and the Right of Relocation”

As part of my dissertation project, I scrutinize the relevant canons of classical liberalism (especially left-libertarianism) to search for the links between the idea of no particular human being’s original ownership of the globe and the right of relocation, and synthesize the logical thrusts inherent in the relevant streams of the libertarian tradition with my original arguments to engage in normative system-building. During this summer, I will be working towards the completion of Chapter 2 of my dissertation. This chapter is, in essence, designed to explore the roots of the right of relocation in classical liberal thought, especially its left-libertarian variant. I will delve deeply into important political theory texts from earlier eras that derive various notions of property rights from the state of nature. In interpreting the various doctrines of property rights derived from the initial common / no ownership of the globe, I will engage in close scrutiny of the relevant primary texts and the genealogical reconstruction of the idea of initial common / no ownership of the globe over time, paying special attention to the exploration of the key left-libertarian property rights theories, e.g., Grotius (1625), Pufendorf (1672), Locke (1690), Ogilvie (1781), Spence (1793), Paine (1796), Dove (1854), Spencer (1851), George (1882).

Paul Gunn

Queen Mary’s College, University of London
Political Science

“Top-down versus bottom-up liberalism: which is the best response to multiculturalism and the politics of difference?”

My aim this summer is to complete a chapter of my dissertation dealing with the liberal response to cultural diversity. The basic premise of the chapter is that modern liberalism’s top-down approach to social problems is ill-suited to cope with the challenges faced by the politics of difference. I argue that the ‘revisionist’ tendency towards declaring substantive, universal moral goals undermines the basic liberal commitments to the respect and defence of individual agency and the endorsement and justification of pluralism. For this reason, I contend that the only plausible liberal response to cultural diversity is a bottom-up, classical liberal response. This chapter is part of a wider exploration of the challenges posed by multiculturalism to political theory.

John Phillips

Brown University
Political Science

“The Resource Curse Literature; An Epistemic Critique”

This chapter is primarily concerned with the ways in which a flawed understanding of the nature of resources affects theory development in the empirical literature on the resource curse. I argue earlier in the dissertation that when it comes to natural resources, people make three conceptual mistakes: they are epistemically shortsighted about the nature of resources, they fail to see the social construction of the value of resources, and as a result they tend to view the quantity of natural resources as more limited than it is. Resources, as I have tried to explain in the preceding chapters, do not appear in our social world ex-nihilo. They are a quintessential dependent variable. Treating a country's resource base as if it were known, immutable, and finite is unlikely to produce good social science and yet this is frequently assumed in the major studies purporting to establish the existence of a resource curse. I argue that explanatory power is likely to be granted to resources that should be granted to some of the human variables that explain resource abundance. In a later chapter, I will try to show that this tends to lead to poor policy recommendations.   

Giacomo Ponzetto

Harvard University
Economics

“Partisanship, Information, and Trade Policy”

In this paper, instead, I explain trade-policy platforms as the outcome of the strategic choices of politicians seeking support among voters, but especially within groups of their core supporters. My analysis builds upon my earlier work on “strategic extremism” (Glaeser, Ponzetto and Shapiro, 2005): voters support a party if they are sufficiently motivated by a preference for its proposed policies compared the opponent’s. The availability of political information is not homogeneous across citizens: a party has affiliates who are more likely to be aware of its choices. Hence, a rational office-seeking politician will choose policies that do not maximize social welfare, but rather overweight the welfare of his partisan supporters. Thus I provide a formal interpretation of the fact that partisanship is a determinant of trade policy, and parties are more than mere conduits used by lobbies to exercise their influence .Prima facie, an emphasis on asymmetric political information is consistent with the evidence that protectionism is greater in developing than developed countries, and among the latter in those that are larger and have more parliamentary constituencies (Mansfield and Busch 1995). It also suggests an explanation for the puzzling observation that trade policy is biased against trade: this can result in the model if the owners of sector-specific capital are better informed than the average worker or consumer—an intuitive hypothesis in the light of their presumably greater education and wealth.   

Philip Potter

UCLA/Harvard
Political Science

“Soft Interdependence and Conflict; How Societal Interaction Contributes to International Peace”

Elina Treyger

Harvard University
Political Science

“Public Order after Communism”

My dissertation offers an explanation for the geography of violent death (i.e. deaths from intentional external injury) on the territory of the former Soviet Union since its collapse. Triggered by the collapse of the communist party-state, lawlessness and violence spread throughout the entire ex-Soviet territory. Within a mere few years of independence, the levels of lethal interpersonal violence soared everywhere, but diverged dramatically across and within new state borders. Some regions of Russia for instance, have higher peacetime homicide rates than just about anywhere in the world, while the homicide rate of Armenia is not much above those of orderly Western European countries. I argue that such stark geographic disparities are not adequately understood by focusing on transitional economic conditions or the new states’ capacity for crime control. Rather, this geography reflects the character and strength of social orders across a highly heterogeneous population. The demise of the behavioral constraints of the Soviet party-state and the pathologies plaguing effective control of lawless behavior by the post-Soviet states devolved the task of social control onto social units: “a people who never learned to trust the state, police, and courts, is once again forced to rely upon its own laws and values,” as Mark Galeotti put it. I demonstrate that territorial communities whose “own laws and values” amounted to stronger social orders, experienced a lower incidence of interpersonal violence. The strength of social orders is itself a product of Soviet social engineering – the weakest social orders are found in regions where Soviet planning produced the greatest demographic dislocations.