Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Despite widespread analysis of the World Bank’s lending operations by both supporters and critics, there has been little external or systematic analysis of the Bank’s research department. This is remarkable, given that the Bank has become the hub of development research worldwide.

This article begins to fill in that gap by exploring the political economy of the research conducted within the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice- Presidency (DEC). Despite the Bank’s public presentation of its research arm as conducting “rigorous and independent” work, this article examines how the Bank’s research has historically become skewed toward reinforcing the dominant neoliberal policy agenda. The article includes a detailed examination of the mechanisms by which the Bank’s research department is able to play a central role in what Robert Wade has elsewhere termed “paradigm maintenance,” including incentives in hiring, promotion, and publishing, as well as selective enforcement of rules, discouragement of dissonant data, and actual manipulation of data. The author’s analysis is based on in-depth interviews with current and former World Bank professionals, as well as examination of internal and external World Bank documents. The article includes analysis of the Bank’s treatment of the work of two of its researchers who write on economic globalization and development: David Dollar and Branko Milanovic.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: A paper examining the different images and rhetoric used by parties and candidates in electoral advertisements. Special attention given to issues owned by a particular party and any variability in message these or other factors produce.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the particular understanding of identity and community and the specific delineation of federalism provided in an understudied text of Rousseau’s, The Government of Poland. In this work Rousseau declares that “large populations” and “vast territories” are “the first and foremost reason for the misfortunes of mankind” and responsible for “the countless calamities that weaken and destroy polite peoples.” He believes that the conditions of the large, modern state make the "love of the laws" or genuine liberty impossible, and as such explores the way this ideal might be reconstituted. To do this, he not only discusses the preconditions for self-government but argues that despotism can be averted only through the formation of a certain type of community as well as reliance on a decentralized mode of governance that takes special care to maintain the autonomy of local communities. This understanding of the Government of Poland, then, breaks with most readings of the text -- it is not treated as a practical or conservative document, but a severe critique of trends in modern politics, one that leads the reader to consider Rousseau's vision of an ideal political community. While the central aim of the paper will be to explicate Rousseau’s arguments identity, community, and radical federalism, care will be taken to relate these concerns to portions of The Social Contract in hopes of illuminating some of that document’s claims. In particular, it will be argued that The Government of Poland can be seen as an extension and modification of Rousseau’s belief, stated at the beginning of Book IV of The Social Contract, that “among the happiest people in the world, bands of peasants are seen regulating their affairs of state under an oak tree, and always acting wisely….”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper explores the process by which presidential nominees choose their vice presidential nominees. Specifically, this paper focuses on Senator McCain and Governor Palin as a current example in order to explore the process of vice presidential s

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Gilberto Freyre is a fundamental reference in Brazilian social thought by virtue of the innovative account of the country’s history he developed beginning with his 1933 magnum opus, Casa-grande & Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves). Predicated on a certain notion of culture – at the time aimed at displacing prevailing racial hypotheses – Casa-grande & Senzala, alongside with Sobrados e Mucambos (Mansions and the Shanties) recount Brazilian colonial and later independent history by and large oriented by the concept of society. This represents a vantage point for an International Relations-based investigation of his work. Despite countless studies about it, Freyre’s work is perhaps yet to receive due attention in terms of its contribution to thinking about the modern international. In this sense, the objective of this paper is to collate Freyre’s narrative about the fall of the Colony’s patriarchal regime and its early 19th century replacement by a bureaucratic regime with the master distinctions of state-society and state-system of states in modern political discourse, integral to the conceptual scheme underpinning traditional thinking in IR. The focus on the deployment of the state concept in Freyre’s corpus is justified by its peculiarities, as it will be seen to be (i) preceded by a direct articulation of Brazilian society to world politics, by means of the depiction of a competition between such forces as agents of the Portuguese Empire and the Jesuits for the organization of colonial society, and then to (ii) take place as a means of market-driven and biopolitical rearrangements of social institutions legated by cultural inflows during Colony. Thus, the paper’s analytical gains should obtain from reflection regarding consonances and/or dissonances posed by Freyre’s works vis-à-vis traditional state-centric approaches to IR.