Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The election of President George W. Bush in 2000 signaled a new partnership between religious institutions, community organizations, and the federal government regarding the delivery of social welfare programs to the public. Theoretically, we might expect that churches are equipped to implement faith-based initiative programs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the federal bureaucracy consists of a large set of complex organizations that slow the implementation of public policy. Moe attributes this problem to the idea that “American public bureaucracy is not designed to be effective” (Moe 1989, 267). However, why should scholars and public officials assume that church organizations are more effective than the federal bureaucracy in dispensing social welfare programs? Religious groups can encounter similar types of organizational problems that impact public or private organizations, such as free riding and a lack of financial and human resources, that limit their ability to manage their organization.
Organizational problems also pose serious problems for church leaders seeking to increase the level of civic engagement in their congregations. We use survey data that we collected from congregations in the Phoenix-metropolitan area to analyze whether religious organizations have the administrative capacity and resources to mobilize for political and social issues within their community. Our study addresses three questions. First, does the organizational structure of a religious institution influence the level of participation among its members in community and social causes? Second, do churches that exist within hierarchically organized denominations experience higher levels of free riding than churches within more egalitarian denominations? Finally, do congregations encounter problems of free riding that significantly hinder their ability to mobilize for political and social causes? Our purpose in exploring these questions is to move beyond current studies on religion and politics that focus on political behavior by incorporating an institutional approach to understand the political role of churches.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Despite a large and growing literature on preferential trade arrangements (PTAs), few scholars have systematically examined why some PTAs have been more successful than others at liberalizing trade among members. In this paper I test extant hypotheses concerning intra-PTA liberalization by examining changes in intra-bloc trade from 1950-2000. I test three broad types of hypothesis: “military-systemic”, “institutional” and “demand-side”. These hypotheses, and my variables, encompass three levels of analysis: the bloc, the member country and the dyad. I find that variables from all three categories and levels of analysis have significant effects on intra-PTA trade liberalization. Explaining such liberalization thus requires attention to military, institutional and economic factors as well as to PTA-wide, national and dyadic effects.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Does institutional variation have implications for questions of conflict and peace? Realists expect no independent effect of international organizations on militarized interstate disputes and dismiss the importance of variation across such organizations. Liberals, on the other hand, offer several mechanisms by which international organizations may alleviate violent conflict. This paper evaluates these competing expectations in the context of regional integration arrangements (RIAs). These organizations display a great deal of variation in their level of institutionalization. Employing an event count model with a panel-data setup and controlling for several alternative explanations, the empirical analysis indicates that higher levels of institutionalization, when implemented, are associated with less conflict. This paper also builds on the statistical results to conduct a qualitative large-N analysis. This analysis provides additional support for my argument. At the same time, it points to some limitations of the liberal claim and to the conditions under which RIAs mitigate conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explains how a free-trade agenda survived a wave of protectionist sentiments in the early 1970s in the United States. I argue that internationalists maintained the liberal agenda by establishing new institutional arrangements which constrained the political influence of protectionist industries. While the argument follows a historical institutionalist logic, it attempts to use the case-study to offer a new conceptualization of the nature of institutions by considering the interaction between political actors and institutions as embodied not only in the political actors, but also in the institutions themselves, and by considering temporality while analyzing the impacts of such interactions. Three arguments follow. First, institutions are the solidified reflection of the balance of social forces at the moment of their creation. This implies that the uneven distribution of benefits across social groups by institutions is an intended outcome of those who had designed the institutions. Second, the causal effectiveness of institutions is not a result of their independence from social forces as much as their ability to intensify relations of power or to reflect a balance of social forces that no longer exists. Third, unanticipated effects within given institutional arrangements are not the outcome of “unintended consequences” but of intended strategies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper seeks to explain the role of non-standard work arrangements in the sex pay gap among scientists and engineers by drawing on a nationally-representative dataset made up of almost 50,000 scientists and engineers. Categorizing non-standard arrangements according to their wages and provision of health and retirement benefits allowed us to rank order them from best to worst. Multivariate regression results failed to confirm our main hypothesis: the inclusion of variables indicating non-standard employment arrangements failed to explain any of the pay gap among scientists and engineers. Nevertheless, we found that the earnings gap varied in different nonstandard employment arrangements. Unlike in the general labor force, sex inequality was greater in the worst non-standard arrangements than in the best, and sex equality was greater in the best arrangements than in the worst. The overall pattern we demonstrate is that arrangements where pay gaps favored men have the most negative job characteristics, and women were overrepresented in them. Surprisingly, women fared well relative to men in two of the highest-quality non-standard arrangements: contract work and short-term contract work. We conclude by raising the following questions: since in the larger labor force men are substantially overrepresented in the high-quality contracting arrangement, what forces make sciences and engineering different in this regard? And why is the sex pay gap less problematic for contract workers in science and engineering than it is for standard-employment workers in science and engineering?