Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 1998-1999

Shana Cohen, Sociology: Waiting for a Different Future: Neoliberalism and the Alienation of the Middle Class in Morocco. This dissertation analyzes the transformation of the middle classes in Morocco during a period of market reform. The declining role of the state in the labor market, education, and ultimately, social mobility has led to the formation of a detached middle in Morocco. This detached middle replaces the modern middle class, which the state created as part of nationalistic development policy. In the fifties through seventies, the state expanded the administration and public sector, as well as education, creating an upwardly mobile, educated (high school and more) class that perceived itself and was regarded as the modern leadership of the nation. Today, policies of structural adjustment and privatization have fragmented the young, educated population into three groups: attendeurs, debrouillards, and enterprisers. Attendeurs include the vast numbers of unemployed or temporarily employed high school and university graduates. Debrouillards are those men and women who, after perhaps years of unemployment, have entered the professions of the older middle class, or teachers, lawyers, doctors, and bureaucrats. The last group, the enterprisers, are entrepreneurs and businessmen and women who have succeeded in industries (mostly service, such as finance and marketing) connected directly to foreign investment and the global economy. Despite differences in career trajectories and social status, these men and women make up a detached middle, or an anti-class marked by an experience of alienation from the nation-state and a practice of detachment from national institutions and civic identity. This alienation originates in the ideological project of modernity and modernization, or the fulfillment of human potential through modern institutions of education and labor. These groups, the population that depends upon education to acquire a white-collar job, identify themselves with this ideology but experience their lives as the foreclosure of possibility, regardless of their relative level of success. In response to this foreclosure, they may participate in civic associations or sympathize with Islamist or leftist opposition. However, their alienation not only throws into question the legitimacy of the regime, but also the mutual dependence between the concept of the nation-state and of individual fulfillment. Ultimately, the dissonance they experience between internal identity and practice pushes them away from the nation-state toward the global arena, through which they can maintain a coherent identity fantasizing about a counter-Morocco in which actualization is possible.

John Giles, Economics: Labor Market Development and the Risk-Coping Behavior of Rural Households. Over the last fifteen years the rural Chinese economy has witnessed an extraordinarily rapid, if uneven, development of markets for both labor and agricultural commodities. The growth of these markets can be a double-edged sword for rural communities. While providing both new income earning opportunities and new mechanisms to cope with negative shocks to income, the growth of markets also forces rural households to face new sources of risk from both fluctuations in the prices of agricultural commodities and uncertain off-farm income. Mr. Giles' dissertation contributes to a body of research that spans the social sciences in looking at the effects of labor market growth on both households and communities in rural areas of the developing world. He makes use of an unusually rich data source combined with a follow-up field survey to study labor market participation and its effects on household risk management decisions. The rapid and uneven growth of labor markets across rural China presents an opportunity to analyze the impact of a phenomenon which took place much more gradually in other parts of the now-developed and developing world.

Benjamin Goldfrank, Political Science: Comparison of Programs for Citizen Participatin in Municipal Government Implemented by Opposition Parties in Venezuela, Brazil, and Uruguay. Almost uniformly, political analysts of and actors in the recently democratized countries of Latin America deplore the quality of the new democracies, pointing to one or another deficiency, including ineffective legislatures, inefficient public bureaucracies, corrupt judiciaries, and, perhaps most strikingly given their mobilization during transitions, apathetic citizens. Leaders across the political spectrum have continually advocated civic renewal. In order to move beyond lamenting the region's democratic deficiencies, Mr. Goldfrank's proposes to study the few cases where local-level governments have created participatory institutions and an active citizenry has sustained them. The central research question is: what were the effects of these new participatory processes on the efficiency, accountability, and effectiveness of local government and on the organization, democratic values, and integration of citizens? Mr. Goldfrank will concentrate on the municipal administrations in three Latin American cities: those of the Workers' Party in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the Broad Front in Montevideo, Uruguay; and the Radical Cause in Libertador, the major municipality of Caracas, Venezuela. In each of these cases, the municipal administration advanced a program of decentralizing city services and of increasing citizen input into how local government operates. Most importantly, these governments opened up new channels for citizens to deliberate over and decide upon local municipal budget allocations, whereas during previous administrations, budget decisions took place in secrecy and citizens' needs were rarely met.

Kenneth Greene, Political Science: The Mobilization of Bias: Party Strategy and Political Representation in Democratic Mexico. This project will describe and explain the formation of electoral strategies in Mexico's three main political parties: The Revolutionalry Institutional Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). The research will address the following three major questions: How do parties in emerging democracies define and establish positions in the electoral marketplace? How does a dominant party with hegemonic resources (PRI) and opposition parties on the left (PRD) and right (PAN) organize initially as pressure groups transform into competitive organizations with coherent policy packages? How do these renovated parties attach key social groups in order to expand from their regional strongholds? Research will concentrate on district party leaders from a sample of Mexico's 300 electoral precincts, with the most in-depth work on Mexico City and Monterrey. Methods include a sample survey, in-depth interviews, and the analysis of electoral and public opinion data. The project will contribute to an understanding of party strategy and party development in Mexico during the period of transition to multipartism and, through a comparison of three parties, will develop a more general theory of strategy formation.

Christine Kulke, History: The Politics and Experience of Ethnic Differentiation: L'viv/Lwów/L'vov/Lemberg, 1939-1953. Between 1939 and 1953, two different ideologically driven regimes radically transformed the multiethnic, borderland city of L'viv. Each regime -- one Nazi, the other Soviet -- imposed its own hierarchical conceptions of ethnicity and nationality on the city's population, thus favoring certain identities over others. What were the similarities and differences between the two sets of hierarchies, in both their theoretical and applied forms? How did the dynamic between official policy and everyday ethnic relations change city residents' understandings of themselves and each other? In answering these questions, Ms. Kulke will compare the efforts of two supranational regimes to reshape a single multiethnic society, and will analyze the impact of those two regimes on the development of cooperation and conflict among ethnic groups within that society. L'viv serves as a useful framework for this comparative project because its Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish communities were comparable in size by 1939, when the Second World War began. The study will continue until 1953, when Stalin's death heralded a change in Soviet nationality policy.

Elisabeth Lamoureux, Geography: Political Marginalization and Economic Struggle: Female Labor Militancy in South Korean Industry. South Korean female factory workers were at the forefront of the Korean labor movement in the 1970s. This research will analyze their marginalization since then, during a period of rapid state-led industrialization and dramatic redefinition of the political landscape in the Pacific Rim. Ms. Lamoureux will examine how the particular combination of growth and restructuring of Korean industry, repressive labor policies in the late 1970s and 1980s, state - industry domination of trade unions throughout the 1980s, and the labor movement's increasing involvement in issues of national politics in the 1990s has eroded the presence and voice of female factory workers in the labor movement. This study will make a critical contribution to the ongoing debates on globalization and political liberalization inthe Pacific Rim by posing gender as central to the processes of rapid industrialization and transition to democracy.

Mari Miura, Political Science: Illiberal Alliances: Market, Preference, and Protection Under the Global Economy in Japan. Does globalization threaten and change social institutions and norms that have been built out of conflicts and compromises between labor and capital in the postwar period? If so, is it because of a shift in the balance of power between unions and managers, or is it because of changes in business preferences? What is the implication of globalization on political strategies and electoral fortune of union-based parties? This dissertation explores these questions by looking at employment policy and party - union relations in Japan during the last three decades. It aims to reveal a cleavage between sheltered sectors and exposed sectors in Japan as has been found elsewhere in advanced economies, and argues that the cleavage had a strong impact on the Japanese party system because the largest left party (JSP) was mainly supported by sheltered sector unions. Moreover, the project examines the illiberal nature of cross-class alliances in exposed sectors and contends that these alliances make neoliberal solutions unappealing in Japan as preferences are embedded in institutions. Ms. Miura's methodology includes extensive in-depth interviews of union leaders, politicians, party members, business representatives, and policy makers.

Dara O'Rourke, Energy and Resources: Community-Driven Regulation: The Political Economy of Pollution in Vietnam. This dissertation examines state and community responses to adverse environmental impacts of industrial development in Vietnam. Through a comprehensive analysis of macro-level policies and the micro-level dynamics of specific firms, the research analyzes processes through which community members, state actors, and, ultimately, factory managers take actions to reduce pollution. Case studies point toward the outlines of a new model of environmental regulation, which Mr. O'Rourke calls Community-Driven Regulation (CDR). Under CDR, community actions play a central role in pressuring state environmental agencies to improve their monitoring and enforcement capabilities, helping to prioritize environmental issues for state action, directly pressuring firms to reduce pollution, increasing monitoring of industrial facilities, and raising public and elite awareness of environmental issues and the trade-offs between development and the environment. The dissertation seeks to theorize the CDR model through an analysis of specific cases in Vietnam, and to examine in detail the complex processes influencing firm environmental performance in different contexts. Examples of community-driven regulation in Vietnam display a dynamic of mutually reinforcing interactions between organized communities and state environmental agencies, pointing to the potential for "state - society synergy" in industrial environmental regulation. The cases also hint at the need for policies which strengthen both state and community roles in environmental protection.

Jan Plamper, History: Representing the Leader: Images of Stalin, 1929-1953. From Mussolini to Mao, from Kim Il Sung to Saddam, leader cults have been a staple feature of twentieth-century authoritarian politics. Atavisms into premodern politics at first glance, these leader cults have been objects of description rather than analysis. In his dissertation on the Stalin Cult, Mr. Plamper argues that this prime exemplar of twentieth-century leader cults must be understood as a hybrid yielded by modernity and dictatorial governance and cannot simply be explained away by residual Russian Orthodoxy. The dissertation investigates the rhetoric and mechanisms of the Stalin Cult in the Soviet Union and one post-War Eastern European satellite state (East Germany). It examines the contents of the images, the institutions involved in deliberating and disseminating them, and the processes of image production in a case study of one cultural mode~painting. Shifting the focus from Cult-ural products to the modes of Cult-ural production, the dissertation should not only add a critical dimension to explaining governance in the Soviet Union, but also provide an explanatory model for leader cults in general, a salient feature of twentieth-century authoritarian politics.

Wendy Wolford, Geography: A Fist is Stronger than Five Fingers? The Past, Politics, and Production on Land Reform Settlements in Brazil. On April 17, 1997, over 30,000 people marched through the streets of Brasilia in a historic demonstration of support for one of the largest grassroots social movements in Brazil's history - O Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST, the Rural Landless Workers' Movement), considered by many today to be the only successful opposition to the Brazilian government. Ms. Wolford proposes to study the itnerplay between property relations and participation in MST by examining production decisions on land reform settlements in two different regions of Brazil -- the southeast and the northeast. The three questions that form the basis of this research are: 1) Who joins MST and why?; 2) In what ways does MST's ideology pass through -- or get turned away from -- the farm gate?; and 3) What effect does MST have on the economic welfare of the settlements? Ms. Wolford will spend the 1998-99 academic year researching these questions in the southeastern Brazilian state of Saõ Paulo; in the following academic year, she will work in the northeastern state of Sergipe.