Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 1994-1995

Karen Adams, Political Science: Nuclear Economy: Providing for State Survival after the Cold War. States can rely only on themselves to generate and sustain most of the capabilities that provide for their survival. What capabilities are likely to provide for state success and survival in the post-Cold War era? How will they compare to those necessary for state survival in other eras, and with what implications for the sufficiency of existing security postures, policies, and theories? Ms. Adams' dissertation will answer these questions by investigating the effects of nuclear proliferation, continuing industrialization, and the movement from a bipolar to a multipolar international political system on the military, economic, and political resources available to powerful states.

Marc Garcelon, Sociology: Democrats and Apparatchiks: The Democratic Russia Movement and the Rebellion of Specialists and Professionals in Moscow, 1989 - 1991. This dissertation analyzes the rise, development, and fragmentation of the Democratic Russia (DR) movement in Moscow in 1990 - 1991. Because DR brought together radical reformers in state bodies with grass-roots voluntary associations into a united opposition front, its analysis is crucial to an understanding of the role of social protest, counter-elites, and mobilization "from below" in the collapse of Soviet communism. Having shown that DR's social base was concentrated among the urban "middle strata" (professionals, scientists, etc.), Mr. Garcelon uses a comparative historical typology of Western and Soviet-type societies as a means to develop a social-historical portrait of Russia's "state-engineered" middle strata and their dependence on state-organized economic redistribution, in contrast to market-based classes in the West. This comparative approach demonstrates how DR represented strata with no discernible class interests in a transition to a market economy. As the realities -- as opposed to the optimistic slogans -- of marketization set in following the defeat of the hard-line coup attempt of August, 1991, the charismatic leader of the "democrats," Boris Yeltsin -- who had always unified DR "from above" -- turned away from the grass roots in favor of a technocratic reform strategy, thus disorienting DR's urban social base. This study thus paints a sociologically informed picture of the reasons behind the rapid decline of the democratic movement in post-communist Russia.

Theodore Gerber, Sociology: In Search of the Soviet Middle Class: Russian Professionals during the Post-Stalin Era. A major problem in comparative/historical and political sociology concerns the historic role played by middle classes in the emergence and consolidation of democratic political institutions. Yet no consensus exists on the composition of these middle classes, the cultural and institutional preconditions for their supposed democratic orientation, and the processes whereby they come to support democratic structures. The disagreement on these issues parallels a debate among observers of Soviet society: some argue that a democratically oriented middle class composed of highly educated professionals emerged during the 1960s as a cohesive, increasingly anti-systemic constituency that would serve as the bulwark for Gorbachev's radical reforms, while others dispute this on various grounds. Neither side in this debate has marshaled much evidence to support its claims. This dissertation presents an empirically based account of how Russian knowledge specialists, and in particular natural scientists, viewed Soviet political and professional institutions and their place in Soviet society during the crucial decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Using a variety of sources, including forty in-depth biographical interviews with scientists, Mr. Gerber identifies the ways in which a key group of Soviet professionals did and did not subjectively resemble the ideal-typical democratically oriented middle classes extolled in the sociological and historical literature. His findings also address specific issues which receive problematic treatment in the Western-based professions literature regarding the way cultural and institutional contexts condition "professional projects" and mediate the impact of occupation on broader values and outlook.

Patrick Heller, Sociology: The Politics of Redistributive Development: State and Class in Kerala, India. This research seeks to address and refocus the central concerns of development theory by placing politics and institutions at the center of our understanding of economic transitions. Specifically, Mr. Heller examines the case of Kerala, a South Indian state, focusing on the relationship between its unique history of lower class mobilization and effective state-led strategy of development. He identifies the political and institutional factors that have contributed to what is widely recognized to be the most successful case of social development in the subcontinent. This includes a detailed study of the relationship between organized elements of the lower classes (unions, cooperatives, and political parties) and the state in both the agrarian and industrial sectors. Finally, by systematically comparing the case of Kerala to India's experience as a whole (where redistributive demands have largely gone unmet) as well as to the literature on other recent cases of economic transition, Mr. Heller explores the institutional and political circumstances under which a state can effectively accommodate popular demands while making the difficult transition to a modern market economy. (Mr. Heller's research was highlighted in the Fall 1993 issue of Currents. This year's grant is a renewal from 1993 - 94.)

Luisa Lambertini, Economics: The Political Economy of Large Public Debts. Ms. Lambertini's research interests focus on the political economy of the accumulation of large public debts in the OECD countries since the early 1970s. The project is divided into two parts. The first part tests empirically the fundamental assumption of the existing literature, namely that budget deficits are run to tie the hands of future governments. The result is a rejection of this hypothesis. The second part concentrates on the analysis of detailed data on government revenues and outlays for the OECD countries. This analysis suggests two explanations to the growth of public debts. First, unemployment rates have been higher while productivity growth has been lower throughout the OECD since 1973, and budget deficits have been run by governments to finance income-maintenance programs such as unemployment compensations and early retirements. Second, nonproportional income taxation makes budget deficits a powerful redistributive tool. Some OECD countries, including the United States, switched to lower and less progressive tax schedules to redistribute income and the future burden of current budget deficits within the population.

Susan Overdorf, Political Science: German Security Doctrine and Eastern Trade Policy: Why Ideas Only Sometimes Become Policy. This project examines the relationship between German security doctrine and trade policy toward Eastern Europe. To what extent does trade policy implement German security goals? Ms. Overdorf will compare two cases from the present period with two pre-1989 examples. Her research will involve interviews with German policy makers and extensive use of German secondary sources and press reports. It will contribute to political science theory-building by examining why ideas are only sometimes implemented as policy.

Andrew Schwartz, Political Science: The Feeding Frenzy: The Politics of Privatization in the Czech Republic. This dissertation tells the story of the Czech voucher plan, reputably the best way to privatize large industries quickly and fairly. The focus is on the interplay of the state with the new interests that develop in the course of privatization and the old interests that formed the backbone of communism. The privatization process is divided into three stages. In the first, the policy conception stage, government officials with input only from the West designated a blueprint for mass (popular) privatization. This plan is in fact the basis for most glowing appraisals of Czech privatization. In the second, the legislative stage, enterprise managers and state bureaucrats were able to influence significant changes of the original blueprint to their benefit. In the third, the implementation stage, the state initially played a direct role in redistributing assets, especially toward the former nomenklatura, but unexpectedly lost control of the process to a set of new institutions -- the bank investment funds -- whose very existence was owed to the incentive structure of the voucher scheme. The outcome of Czech voucher privatization is a cross-holding tangle in which the bank investment funds and the state, still a major stakeholder, share the most influence. Clearly subordinate are organized business organizations and trade unions, the classical economic organizations of civil society, which are sometimes considered necessary for a democratic pluralist or corporatist compromise. The result is a new species of political economy in which power is likely to remain centralized despite the best efforts of privatization's engineers to create private property.

Rudra Sil, Political Science: Social Change, Corporate Groups, and the State in Late Industrialization: China, India, Japan, and Russia in the Twentieth Century. This dissertation is an attempt to reconcile studies of social change and cultural identity with studies of state-led development strategies. Mr. Sil is working toward a theoretical synthesis that rejects teleological or evolutionary assumptions but combines aspects of modernization theory, cultural theory, as well as state-centered theories of development. He will examine the cases of China, India, Japan, and Russia to identify whether and/or how state leaders of these nations sought to cope with the problem of subnational identities, and how effectively they designed a system to promote labor harmony at the level of enterprise.

Lucien Taylor, Anthropology: The Fortification of Fort-de-France and the Unification of Europe. This dissertation takes an ethnographic approach to Martinique. Established as a New World slave society in the seventeenth century, "emancipated" in 1948, transformed into a fully incorporated overseas "départment" of France in 1946, and formally included in a "united" Europe in 1993, Martinique continues today as a uniquely anomalous paracolonial remnant of empire. In the past half-century, Martinique has undergone an extraordinary transformation: local self-supporting productivity has diminished drastically, while, enabled by immense budgetary outlays from France, the island (theoretically) enjoys 100 percent literacy, French welfare, and free and compulsory education. This culture of consumption has had extraordinary implications for lived experience and personal identity. Some scholars have argued that it has enforced an unquestioning internalization of French norms and values. Nonetheless, Fort-de-France is now witnessing an extraordinary artistic and intellectual efflorescence -- not least among a loose network of writers who in their internationally famous manifesto of 1989, Eloge de la Créolité, proclaimed, "Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles," and moreover that "[t]he world is evolving into a state of Créolité." In interrogating this concept of Créolité, as well as studying contemporary Martinican intellectual life more broadly as it seeks to come to terms with Martinique's incorporation within the European Economic Community, Mr. Taylor hopes both to take an ethnographic approach to intellectuals and simultaneously to explain the sociocultural effects of what is so exceptional about the island (its perduring paracoloniality). He also hopes to discern how the social formation of Martinique may prefigure the constitution of cities in other multiethnic societies emerging around the world.

Teresa Wright, Political Science: Comparative Study of the Origins, Repertoires, and Outcomes of Chinese Student Protest. This project undertakes a comparative study of two Chinese student protest movements, the "People's Movement" of 1989 in China and the "Sanyue" (month of March) movement of 1990 in Taiwan. The project proceeds from the fundamental assertions of the "political process" approach, with a particular focus on the "dense network of intermediate-level groups and informal associations" involved in social movements. These two foci will be incorporated into the notion of "social location." This project defines a group's social location according to its placement within the macro-economic and political structure within society, its microstructural characteristics (e.g., the nature and extent of its organization and networks), its level of political consciousness, and cultural conceptions regarding the "place" of that group within society. Given this, Ms. Wright hypothesizes that a group's social location will determine whether or not it will engage in political protest at a given time, what repertoires of collective action it will choose should it engage in protest, and what the outcomes of its participation in political protest will be. With this framework, she will examine how the various aspects of the social location of students in China and Taiwan influenced the origins, repertoires, and consequences of the movement of 1989 in China and the movement of 1990 in Taiwan. By proceeding in an explicitly comparative manner, this study will not only extend current understandings of these movements, but will add insight to the study of collective action in general.