Placement candidates, 2012-13
Erin Crandall
Canadian Politics, ABD (Ph.D. expected winter 2013)
Dissertation: Understanding Judicial Selection Reform: Comparing Australia, Canada, and the United States
Committee: Christopher P. Manfredi (Chair), Jacob T. Levy, Maria Popova
Dissertation Abstract: This dissertation analyses the timing and nature of reforms to judicial appointments systems of final courts of appeal, the first study of its kind to consider both formal and informal reforms across three advanced, stable democracies: Canada, Australia, and the United States. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and archival research, the project finds that changes to judicial appointments systems tend to evolve incrementally over time, rather than at moments of critical juncture. In addition, it highlights the importance that institutional rules can play in structuring the opportunities for and outcomes of reform. Finally, this dissertation confirms that there is a correlation between the perception of increased judicial empowerment and calls for judicial appointments reform. Consequently, as the judicial branches in various countries continue to gain political power, interest in and attempts to reform the judicial appointments processes of these courts are likely to continue, making research of such reform all the more essential.
Daniel Doueck
Comparative/IR, Ph.D. (2012)
Dissertation: Counterinsurgency's Impact on Transitions from Authoritarianism: the Case of South Africa
Committee: Khalid Medani (Chair), Juliet Johnson, Philip Oxhorn
Dissertation Abstract: Counterinsurgency’s impact on transitions from authoritarianism remains poorly understood and undertheorized by the civil war and democratic transitions literatures. Using archival sources and interviews with ex-rebels, this dissertation examines the apartheid counterinsurgency program’s hidden history. A program of clandestine violence and intelligence operations orchestrated at the regime’s highest military and political echelons, it intensified during the 1990-94 transitional period. This study analyzes its impacts on the state and its security sector during and after the negotiated transition. By marginalizing former rebels with high popular legitimacy, counterinsurgency disables security sector reform, while preserving entrenched criminal networks and racist tendencies within the police and army. This perpetuates institutional illegitimacy and corruption, and weakens security sector responses to post-transition violence, thereby distorting democratic outcomes. It also leaves lasting impacts at the social capital and participatory levels.
Publication: "They Became Afraid When they Saw Us MK": Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the Bantustan of Transkei, 1988-94,' Journal of Southern African Studies (forthcoming)
Anthony Kevins
Comparative Politics, ABD (Ph.D. expected Summer 2013)
Dissertation: Filling the Gaps: The Extension of Income Support and Healthcare in France, Italy, and Beyond
Dissertation Committee: Stuart Soroka (Chair), Antonia Maioni, Hudson Meadwell
Dissertation Abstract: While numerous welfare systems have been characterised by significant gaps in coverage, the extent to which governments have filled these gaps varies substantially across the developed world. Examining the evolution of welfare states since the Second World War, this dissertation explores the factors that have impacted coverage levels and the standardisation of benefits, with a primary focus on healthcare and income support for the unemployed in France and Italy. Comparing developments in the two countries, the Italian case is marked by a sharp transition to universalism in healthcare but a continued lack of universally available social assistance, while in France transformations within the pre-existing framework have prevailed in both sectors. Through a comparison of two fields that are infrequently studied together, the dissertation adds to the existing literature by specifying a neoinstitutional argument designed to explain pressures for increased benefit coverage levels. Using archival research, in-depth interviews, and statistical analysis, the contrasted outcomes in the cases are explained with reference to the impact of specific structural factors on public preferences and other pressures for reorganisation: in the case of healthcare, central importance is given to the role of Left-wing actors, shaped by the structure of health insurance, acting in tandem with regionalisation; in the field of benefits for the unemployed, the political ramifications of family structure and the informal economy are argued to be paramount. The arguments developed using the case studies are then tested cross-nationally using statistical analysis, exploring the different factors at play across different worlds of welfare.
Andrea Lawlor
Canadian Politics, ABD (Ph.D. expected July 2013)
Dissertation: Understanding Public Policy Through Media’s Lens
Committee: Stuart N. Soroka (Chair), Eric Bélanger, Antonia Maioni
Dissertation abstract: Media have both direct and indirect influences on policy, and can serve at various times as a contributor to policy, a conduit of policy information to policymakers, and a reflection of policy change to policymakers and the broader public alike. Although the literature on media and public policy notes that media influence the debate, either through affecting policymakers directly, systematically pushing policy alternatives, or simply through influencing citizens’ opinion, current scholarship often omits a critical role for media: reflecting the policy process. Mass media are the public’s largest source of information on public policy, yet the volume and tone of media reporting on policy over time, not to mention what we can learn about public policy through it, is often overlooked. This dissertation discusses the ways in which media can directly and indirectly influence public policy, and how we can use media as a tool to better understand the complexity of public policy and how coverage of policy can be quite independent of both public and elite opinion. Using automated content analysis of over 25-years worth of comparative media data, this dissertation makes a contribution to multiple areas of the public policy literature, first by addressing substantive policy issues such as pensions, immigration, and welfare policy, and second by contributing to our understanding of how framing, issue definition and the use of language and rhetoric impact public discussion and understanding of policy.
Theodore McLauchlin
Comparative Politics/International Relations, PhD (2012)
Dissertation: Desertion, Control, and Collective Action in Civil Wars
Committee: Hudson Meadwell (chair), Stephen M. Saideman, Michael Brecher, T.V. Paul
Dissertation abstract: This dissertation develops and tests a new theoretical synthesis for understanding how armed groups keep their combatants fighting rather than deserting or defecting. It examines two basic methods of limiting desertion: keeping coercive control over combatants, and fostering norms of mutual cooperation among them. It argues that the effectiveness of each approach is conditioned by the degree to which combatants value the common aim of the success of the armed group. Norms of cooperation require a commitment to this common aim to be effective. Control can be effective even when combatants are uncommitted, but loses effectiveness with severe disagreements among combatants.
This approach provides an advance on past work on the requirements for armed groups in civil wars. Some assume, unrealistically, that common aims drive individual behaviour directly. Others focus exclusively either on individual rewards and punishments or on norms of cooperation. This dissertation, in contrast, sees each as important and as contingent upon the prior consideration of whether combatants share a common aim.
A qualitative analysis of armed groups in the Spanish Civil War examines micro-level evidence about common aims, the provision of control, and the emergence of norms of cooperation. The dissertation then tests its major hypotheses statistically using two original datasets of soldiers from that war, based on the author’s archival research. It conducts further statistical tests against a new dataset of defection from government armies in 28 civil wars during the 1990s. It concludes with a discussion of new directions.
Publications:
Theodore McLauchlin and Wendy Pearlman, “Out-group conflict, in-group unity? Exploring the effect of repression on intra-movement cooperation.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 56, no. 1 (February 2012): 41-66.
Theodore McLauchlin, “Loyalty Strategies and Military Defection in Rebellion.” Comparative Politics 42, no. 3 (April 2010): 333-350.
“Can You Go Home Again? Desertion and Control over Hometowns in Civil Wars.” Working paper no. 34, Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals.
mcgill.academia.edu/TheodoreMcLauchlin
Vincent Post
Comparative Politics, ABD (Ph.D. expected 2014)
Dissertation: Putting Out the Fire, or Fanning the Flames? How regulating secret service files and personnel affects the politicization of the communist past
Committee: Juliet Johnson (Chair), Maria Popova, Elaine Weiner
Dissertation abstract: This dissertation tests two contrasting hypotheses regarding the effects of transitional justice (TJ) policies targeting communist era secret service files and personnel in six post-communist democracies. One hypothesis holds that bringing all information out in the open and sanctioning those who collaborated with the secret service (a policy known as lustration) will eventually end the controversies that this issue causes, and will remove the debate over the communist past from the agenda. A rival hypothesis holds that lustration and file access policies perpetuate this debate by making available more information about former secret service collaborators and reinforcing the notion that they are still a force to be reckoned with. Ultimately, this might contribute to a renewed demand for further TJ policies. The study combines a large-N analysis of newspaper coverage from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria between 1990 and 2012 with in-depth case studies, relying primarily on elite interviews, of developments in the Czech Republic and Slovakia over that period.
Emmanuelle Richez
Canadian Politics, Ph.D. (2012)
Dissertation: The Impact of Charter-based Judicial Review on Pan-Canadian Cultural Citizenship
Committee: Christopher P. Manfredi (Chair), Antonia Maioni, Kirsten Anker
Dissertation abstract: This dissertation evaluates the impact of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) jurisprudence on Canada's cultural rights structure and cultural citizenship. In total, the dissertation analyzes 49 Supreme Court Charter decisions in the areas of minority language, multiculturalism and aboriginal issues, as well as their reception by governmental authorities. It argues that Charter-based judicial review has confirmed and pushed further the choice Canada made after the Second World War to promote a polyethnic citizenship. The dissertation also formulates three larger theoretical claims. First, that the recognition of specific cultural rights for certain groups that go beyond fundamental political and civil rights brings about positive legal change for minorities. This has especially been the case for the Anglophone minority inside Quebec and the Francophone minority outside Quebec, as well as for aboriginal communities across Canada. Secondly, that constitutionally entrenching rights and the transfer of power to the judiciary to invalidate laws that contravene those rights, is crucial for greater accommodation of diversity. As shown in the Canadian case, the Supreme Court's rulings in favour of minorities have been enforced by governmental authorities. Thirdly, that institutional nation-building objectives limit judicial review‘s potential for facilitating greater accommodation of diversity. The ideal of a polyethnic pan-Canadian citizenship prevents the recognition of new self-government rights for aboriginal peoples and Francophone Quebecers, even though there is interpretive space for such a constitutional reading.
Publications
Emmanuelle Richez. "Francophone Minority Communities: The Last Constitutional Standard Bearers of Trudeau's Language Regime." 2012. International Journal of Canadian Studies. 45-46: 35-53.
Emmanuelle Richez and Marc André Bodet. "Fear and disappointment: Explaining the Persistence of Support for Quebec Secession." 2012. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 22(1): 77-93.