Graduate Program - Comparative Politics Faculty

Gerard Alexander - My research began with a focus on the conditions of democratic consolidation in advanced industrial countries, especially in Western Europe. My first book -- The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Cornell University Press, 2002) -- argued that the key right-of-center political movements formed long-term commitments to democracy only when their political risks in democracy became relatively low as left agendas moderated across time. Variation in these risks was used to explain variation in conservative regime preferences and in regime outcomes in Europe's five largest countries from the 1870's France to 1980's Spain. This first research project also included two articles with related but distinct arguments. In the Journal of Theoretical Politics (2001), I argued that formal political institutions in democracy cannot create the degree of predictability needed for consoldiation. In Comparative Political Studies (2002), I argue that non-formal social-structural characteristic of countries are more important causes of regime outcomes than the formal regime characteristics emphasized in prominent claims concerning the rule of law and “institutionalized uncertainty.” Related reasoning is the basis of an article in The National Interest, “The Authoritarian Illusion” (2004). My current research concerns factors affecting the size and role of government in selected cases in Western Europe and also the United States, and how they influence conservative attempts at reform of welfare states.

Arista Cirtautas

John Echeverri-Gent’s current research falls into two projects. He is completing a book-length manuscript on the political construction of capital markets. This work explores the political construction of capital market institutions drawing from the scholarship of economists like Douglass North and Avner Grief as well as economic sociology including Max Weber, Mark Granovetter and Neil Fligstein. The empirical focus is primarily on India with comparisons to the United States and Cote D’Ivoire among others. The second project grows out of his work as chair of the APSA Task Force on Difference and Inequality in Developing Societies. This collective project with 13 other political scientists examines the diverse and often subtle consequences of inequality for the politics of democratization, social conflict, economic development, and globalization. It also explores the limits of universal analytical models and the possibility that they might lead to an “imperialism of categories” blinding us to diversity and diminishing our capacity for understanding.

Echeverri-Gent’s books include The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States (University of California Press, 1993) and Economic Reform in Three Giants: U.S. Foreign Policy and the USSR, China, and India (Transaction, 1990) which he co-edited. He has written many articles on the political economy of development and comparative public policy including “Financial Globalization and India’s Equity Market Reform,” India Review 3:3 (November 2004).“Political Economy of India’s Fiscal and Financial Policy,” in Economic Policy Reform in India: The External, Financial, and Fiscal Scenario edited by Anne O. Krueger and Sajjid Z. Chinoy. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2003, and “Politics in India’s Decentered Polity” in India Briefing: Quickening the Pace of Change edited by Alyssa Ayers and Philip Oldenburg (M.E. Sharpe, 2002).

He is the winner of the 1993 Theodore J. Lowi Award presented by the Policy Studies Organization for best article in the Policy Studies Journal. He has also served as MacArthur Scholar in residence at the Overseas Development Council, Senior Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies, and Fulbright Scholar. He received his B.A. from Duke University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Robert Fatton Jr. is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He also served as Chair of the Department of Politics from 1997 to 2004. He is the author of several books and a large number of scholarly articles. His publications include: Haiti's Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (2002); Black Consciousness in South Africa (1986); The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal's Passive Revolution, 1975-1985 (1987); and Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa (1992). He is also co-editor with R. K. Ramazani of The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World (2004).

He is now working on a new book tentatively entitled: “The Authoritarian Habitus,” which seeks to explain the historical and material roots of despotic regimes in Haiti.

Born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, now an American citizen, Fatton studied in the mid 1970s in France, later earning a Bachelors Degree from Goshen College, Indiana, in 1976. He holds Masters and Doctoral Degrees from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He has been teaching at the University of Virginia since 1981.

David Jordan

Andrew Lawrence

Allen Lynch

Carol Mershon — My research and teaching focus on the ways that institutions constrain the choices of political actors. I also explore the ways that institutions evolve and change due to actor choice. My early work as a political scientist analyzed leadership and alliances in union organizations. I have studied opinion coalitions in the judicial arena. My first single-authored book (The Costs of Coalition, Stanford 2002) and associated publications examined coalition executives in parliamentary democracies. I am currently engaged in two research projects: one on the causes and consequences of party switching among legislators (funded by the National Science Foundation); and the other, related to the first, on sources of change in democratic party systems. In all of my research, I am interested in how and why elected representatives (in the judicial research, non-elected guardians of the law) form and rupture alliances in efforts to get what they want. While many of my publications concentrate on Western Europe, my teaching and my current research include empirical evidence from the United States, Japan, Russia, and Brazil. For further details on my professional background, see my personal website.

David O’Brien — I have written on Japan’s constitutional law in To Dream of Dreams: Religious Freedom and Constitutional Politics in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996) and xxxx… A more detailed profile of my work listing publications in my primary area of research, American constitutional law and judicial politics, can be found on the American Politics subfield site.

William Quandt does research on American Foreign Policy in the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict. His major book in this field is Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, (Brookings 2001). He is currently working on a new edition of that work that should be published in 2005. Another area of his research has been political development in Middle Eastern countries, especially Algeria, a topic of two of his books, most recently, Between Ballots and Bullets: Algeria's Transition from Authoritarianism (Brookings 1998).

James Savage — My research and teaching focus on comparative budgetary, fiscal, and macroeconomic policy, with an emphasis on the United States, the European Union, and Japan. I am particularly interested in the development of macrobudgetary rules, procedures, and institutions in these countries, and how they influence fiscal outcomes.
My research on the EU includes a study of the EU's Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact (Making the EMU: The Politics of Budgetary Surveillance and the Enforcement of Maastricht, Oxford University Press, 2005). Research for the book was conducted as a Fulbright-European Union Affairs fellow with the European Commission. My studies of the development of Japanese budgetary procedures ("The Origins of Budgetary Preferences: The Dodge Line and the Balanced Budget Norm in Japan," 2002), and policy ("A Decade of Deficits and Debt: Japanese Fiscal Policy and the Rise and Fall of the Fiscal Structural Reform Act of 1997," 2000), stem from research conducted at the Japanese Ministry of Finance.

Leonard Schoppa — My research focuses on the politics and foreign relations of Japan and is comprised of several distinct projects. I am currently devoting most of my energy to a project examining the transformation of Japan’s system of social protection as it has been buffeted by the pressures of globalization and changing gender role aspirations of women. In the book manuscript, tentatively titled Race for the Exits: Women, Firms, and the Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection, I explain the failure of the Japanese to modify their system in the face of these pressures by building on Albert Hirschman’s exit-voice framework. The first piece derived from this project came out in Foreign Affairs (Sept/Oct 2001) under the title “Japan, the Reluctant Reformer.”

I have also written extensively about Japan’s economic negotiations with the United States in a book titled Bargaining With Japan: What American Pressure Can and Cannot Do (Columbia, 1997) and on Japan’s policy immobilism in Education Reform in Japan (Routledge, 1991). Refereed articles growing out of these same earlier projects came out in International Organization (1993, 1999) and the Journal of Japanese Studies (1991). Finally, I have published on the electoral and party politics of Japan and other advanced industrialized nations, including one article advancing a novel argument about the effects of the “mixed-member” electoral systems pioneered in Germany and adopted in a modified form in Japan and Italy in the mid-1990s. I co-authored this piece with my graduate student, Karen Cox, in Comparative Political Studies (2002). For more details on my research and professional background, see my personal website.

Herman Schwartz--My research focuses on the political and economic causes for the relocation of production on a global scale, and the political and economic consequences of such shifts. This obviously is an enormous subject, and my published work therefore has dealt with discrete aspects of this. My work also necessarily strays from analyzing the international economy as a whole -- why these changes or continuities? -- into comparative political economy -- why did these specific policies arise or have these effects? With respect to comparative political economy I have broad research interests in the political economy of economic development, and the politics of social protection and welfare in advanced industrial countries. With respect to the international economy I have broad research interests in why we have the specific geographic distribution of economic activity that we can observe, the global flow of capital, and the construction and maintenance of US hegemony in the contemporary era. The unity of these interests is expressed in specific projects, which have examined, for example, welfare state restructuring as an outcome driven by the changing nature of US hegemony.

David Waldner - My teaching and research begin with investigation into the causes of different forms of state formation and the consequences of variations in state-building trajectories for economic development and democratization. Although I began my professional career as a specialist in Middle East politics, my current work includes material from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well. My empirical work raises questions about theory and method, questions that I explore in courses and papers about theories of comparative politics, qualitative methods, and the philosophy of science. My first book is State Building and Late Development. My two current book projects are Democracy and Dictatorship in the Post-Colonial World and The Philosophy of Social Science Methods. Recent papers include “Anti Anti-Determinism,” “On the Non-Institutional Origins of the Institutional Origins of Capitalism,” and “Inferences and Explanations at the K/T Boundary… and Beyond.” I regularly teach three graduate seminars: Qualitative Methods, Political Development, and Origins of Democracy and Development.

Brantly Womack’s China research falls into four categories. The first is the development and transformation of ideology. Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought (Hawaii, 1982; Chinese edition 2004) is the major work in this category. The second is the relationship of public authority and popular power—democracy in its broadest sense. This has involved analyses of rural revolution as well as political reform since the death of Mao and the theory of party-state democracy. The third category is more diffuse, consisting of research projects aimed at evaluating various major thrusts in China’s politics and economy during the reform era. Here he has published on electoral reform, the media, and provincial diversification. The most characteristic work of this category is Politics in China (Little, Brown,1986; Chinese editions 1994, 2003), co-authored with James Townsend. The last area has combines his interest in China with research on Vietnam. This has involved comparisons of their politics, but also various aspects of their interaction. The major product of this research is China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry (Cambridge, forthcoming).

Visiting Speakers:

Lansing-Lee Speakers Series — A member of the UVA comparative politics faculty each year joins an international relations faculty member to organize a “proseminar” that brings visiting speakers to present papers to an organized group of departmental graduate students who are required to read the papers prior to the seminar and engage the guest in a critical discussion of his or her arguments. Speakers in the field of comparative politics who have joined us in recent years have included Richard Katz, Barry Weingast, Jose Antonio Cheibub, R. N. Lebow, and Kanchan Chandra.

Political Economy Speakers Series — The University's Bankard Fund supports a speakers series that brings to Charlottesville distinguished CP scholars whose
work focuses on the broad theme of politics and economics. Recent speakers include Kathleen Thelen, Sven Steinmo, Frances Rosenbluth, Mark Hallerberg, and David Cameron. These funds also support advanced graduate student doctoral research in this area.

Roland-Egger Lecture Series — The Department brings a distinguished speaker to the grounds each year from one of the political science subfields. Recent speakers include, David Collier, Gary Marx, and Herbert Kitschelt.

Page-Barbour Lecture Series — The University’s most prestigious lecture series has been sponsoring world-renowned visiting lecturers since 1907. Recently these have included the political scientists James Scott and Ira Katznelson.