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Hi! I am a research associate at the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University. My research focuses on political development, comparative party politics, and political economy.
My dissertation, Reinventing Mass Politics: Learning and Innovation on the interwar German Right, analyzes the organizational transformation of conservative party politics in the Weimar Republic. The project addresses three questions. The project asks, first, how do weak parties innovate? Second, how do party activists acquire and refine political skills? Third, how did conservative parties transition from elite parliamentary parties to catch-all parties from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century? I draw on a range of sources and methods to answer these questions, including sequence analysis of new career data of party elites collected from biographical encyclopedia and monographs, and archives. My coauthored book, The African American Experience in the Era of Shareholder Primacy: Why US Socio-Economic Mobility Declined, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. We take a novel approach to explaining the declining rate of employment mobility across American society by drawing on the development of the Black middle class as our key site of analysis. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, Black Americans with no more than a high-school education suddenly gained access to well-paid union jobs that set the stage for intergenerational employment mobility and the future potential for a robust Black middle class. Unlike ethnic whites before them, however, global competition and mass offshoring combined with the growing financialization of the corporation to decimate these stable, well-paid blue-collar jobs. Using a novel dataset of historical employment records from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, we show how the transformation of the business corporation and declining government investments in the U.S. labor force left once upwardly-mobile Black Americans particularly vulnerable to downward mobility. | ||
