My research is on popular politics and citizen empowerment. I study the development of democracy and the creation of a more just society, focusing upon the role of average citizens in those processes. My first book, The Political Ecology of the Modern Peasant, (Johns Hopkins, 1994) was on popular mobilization in the effort to create a more just and humane society, looking specifically at Costa Rica and Nicaragua and studying political mobilization among peasants. The forms of mobilized politics I studied included peasant involvement in revolution and non-violent reformist political action. The Political Ecology suggests a theory for understanding popular mobilization among the peasantry: it argues that peasants blend individual self-interest with concerns about community in a manner that makes the two forms of motivation reinforce each other. Being a responsible member of a community is also in an individual's self-interest. The theory in this book has implications far beyond Central America and far beyond peasant politics. It provides broad outlines about how popular mobilization can help create a better and more fair human society. The book won the American Political Science Association Transformational Politics Section Best Book Award for a book that points toward ways that we can transform our society.
As Latin America has democratized, I have begun to study citizen involvement in politics through democratic procedures and institutions. Again, the focus is upon popular politics and popular perceptions and upon how citizens can empower themselves through political action. My second book, co-authored with Lawrence C. Dodd, is Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990-2001, (University of Chicago Press, 2005) speaks both to the field of comparative politics and to the field of American politics and shows how citizens can use reasoned vote choice to end war, change their government, and begin a transition toward capitalism and liberal democracy. Learning Democracy offers to American politics an application of two theories of citizen vote choice, Morris Fiorina's theory of retrospective voting and Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock's theory of prospective voting. Learning Democracy combines these theories to show how the citizens of Nicaragua engaged in thoughtful, reflective vote choice across three elections in 1990, 1996, and 2001. Citizens used retrospective and prospective thinking to accomplish an electoral revolution and a regime change from socialism and a command economy to liberal democracy and a capitalist economy. To the field of comparative politics Learning Democracy illustrates the limitations of previous theories of democratization and shows how these theories have created expectations that are too confined to include or even imagine the democratization process currently underway in Nicaragua. Learning Democracy proposes a new theory of democratization that centralizes the role of citizen choice and the capacities of average citizens to engage in reflective thinking processes that resemble the processes of vote choice made by citizens in older and more established democracies.
Current Research
I am currently working on several new projects. One continues my interest in the role of citizen politics but this time looks at the creation of social capital in a newly democratizing context. This project is a book manuscript currently entitled Politics on Faith: Social Capital in Nicaragua and Argentina. This project is a study of different kinds of popular political values that result from different kinds of mass organizations. The mass organizations contrasted are Sandinismo in Nicaragua and Peronism in Argentina. This third project is a study of social capital as it relates to democratic development today and thus ties into the current research in political science on social capital in relation to democracy. However, this study is an examination of two new and developing democracies, rather than of established democracies, and is an examination of the role of different kinds of social capital in the ongoing process of democratic development. Politics on Faith exists as a completed draft manuscript. It is being circulated among colleagues for comments.
In the spring semester of 2008 I was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. During that time I finished the research for a new book entitled Democracy and the Welfare State in Argentina. This book scrutinizes the seventeen year period from the initial return to democracy in December, 1983 until the end of the Menem presidency in 1999. Those seventeen years saw the establishment of democracy in Argentina and the achievement of civilian control over the military. These early successess were followed by extensive privatization of state-run companies and services and a significant reform of the state to downsize its responsibilities to society. Democracy and the Welfare State looks at the role of national institutions in these major political and economic reforms, concentrating upon the role of the presidency and the legislature in the reforms. The theoretical framework for this project draws upon the delegative democracy argument of Guillermo O'Donnell and upon the literature of American politics that concentrates on the power of the presidency both within and beyond times of crisis. In order to place the Argentine experience in comparative perspective, this projects looks at the behavior of powerful executives in the advanced industrial democracies, including the United States, France, Germany and Britain and in the Latin American case of Chile. The data for this research are qualitative and quantitative. They include extensive interviews with political elites in Argentina (former legislators, former members of the cabinet, labor leaders, and provincial political leaders) and an events data base which covers executive decrees issued in Argentina across the twentieth century, Congressional response to those decrees, and press coverage of the decrees.
An ongoing co-authored project constitutes the second phase of my work with Lawrence Dodd. Phase one of the work culminated in the publication of our co-authored book, Learning Democracy, (Chicago, 2005). This second phase has benefitted from a new grant from the National Science Foundation to study the 2006 election in Nicaragua. In addition to continuing our study of citizen electoral opinion as democracy matures in Nicaragua, this second phase includes two new dimensions of the study of Nicaraguan democracy. The first of these dimensions is a focus upon the development of Nicaragua's legislature and the second involves the study of local level politics, capturing political and electoral dynamics at the level of municipalities. This second phase of the project has involved extensive new field research in Nicaragua. I visited Nicaragua multiple times in 2006, 2007, and 2008. During these field visits I interviewed current and former legislators from all major parties and mayors in half of the municipalities in eight departments nationwide. These were the departments of Leon, Chinandega, Esteli, Matagalpa, Boaco, Chontales, Rivas and Granada. We will be carrying out a study of the municipal election currently scheduled for November 9, 2008.Selected Publications
books
The Political Ecology of the Modern Peasant: Calculation and
Community,
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 (selected for Best Book Award,
Transformational Politics Section, American Political Science
Association and for Outstanding Book Award, Choice academic magazine)
Learning Democracy: Citizen Engagement and Electoral Choice in Nicaragua, 1990-2001, with Lawrence C. Dodd, The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
refereed articles
"Alternative Action: Peasants as Positive Participants," Journal of Latin American Studies, February, 1990
"Post-Materialism from a Peasant Perspective: Political Motivation in Costa Rica and Nicaragua," Comparative Political Studies, March, 1990
"Mixed Blessings: Disruption and Organization Among Costa Rican Peasant Unions," Latin American Research Review, March, 1991 published in Spanish, Revista de Historia, San Jose, Costa Rica, September, 1992
"Agrarian Politics and Revolution: Micro and State Perspectives on Structural Determinism," Journal of Theoretical Politics, October, 1993.
"Neutrality and Bias in the 1990 Nicaraguan Pre-Electoral Polls," American Journal of Political Science, May, 1994.
"Radicalism and Reformism in a Democratic Context," with Mitchell Seligson, American Journal of Political Science, November, 1994.
"Between Quiescence and Rebellion Among the Peasantry," Journal of Theoretical Politics, October, 1997
"Comportamiento Electoral y Democracia en Nicaragua: 1990-2001," with Lawrence C. Dodd, America Latina Hoy, (Salamanca), April, 2002.
""Nicaragua Votes: The Elections of 2001," with Lawrence C. Dodd, Journal of Democracy, July, 2002.
"Of Wild and Cultivated Politics: Conflict and Democracy in Argentina," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Fall, 2002.
"Post-socialist Democratization: A Comparative Political Economy Model of the Vote for Hungary and Nicaragua," with Michael Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier, Electoral Studies, September, 2003
"Democratie Envers et Contre Tout: Comportement Electoral au Nicaragua, 1990-2001," with Lawrence C. Dodd, Revue Le Banquet, (Paris), # 21 October, 2004, pp 293-323
"Fascism or Revolution?" The Politics of the Rural Poor in New Democracies, International Political Science Review, April, 2006
"The Authoritarian Executive? Horizontal and Vertical Accountability in A New Democracy: A Nicaraguan Perspective," Latin American Politics and Society, Summer, 2006
book chapters
"Public Opinion and Electoral Politics in Nicaragua," in Mitchell Seligson and John Booth, eds., Democracy and Elections in Central America, Revisited, 2nd ed, The University of North Carolina Press 1995.
"La Contribucion de partidos pre-democraticos a una democracia en transicion: el caso de Nicaragua," Selected Procedings of the First Central American Congress of Political Science, EDUCA, San Jose, Costa Rica, 2004
"Graduate Education in a Pluralist Context: The Metaphor of a Tool Box," in Kristen Renwick Monroe, Perestroika! The Raucus Revolution in Political Science," Yale University Press, 2005
Fellowships and Grants