I am a political, comparative-historical, and urban sociologist who focuses largely on power, urban growth, and inequality, and who has broad interests in social theory, political economy, and the philosophy of the social sciences. My research falls into three areas: the relationship between urbanization and political development; the nature of civil society and of the state; and the methodological grounds on which we can draw sound conclusions about social and political phenomena and change. I focus empirically on Latin America, using comparative-historical analysis, case studies, and mixed methods to draw my substantive conclusions. My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), among others, and my articles have been published or are forthcoming in Comparative Sociology, Research in Political Sociology, and other venues.
Urbanization and political development. My dissertation and book project, The Political Development of Urban Clientelism, represents an attempt to rethink the relationship between politics and the growth of cities by centering inequality. Classical social theorists (such as Tönnies and Simmel) consider urban growth a key aspect of societal modernization, oftentimes summarized in the refrain “urban air makes you free”; political sociologists (like Weber and Elias) tend to think that modernization is characterized by the progressive formalization of power relations and state monopolization of political authority, which is perhaps best illustrated by transitions from subjecthood to citizenship. The problem with such accounts, in my view, is that they pay too little attention to inequality. Through an analysis of 20th century Latin America, which experienced the fastest and most extensive urban expansion in world history, I show that when urbanization is concentrated among society’s poorest, it counters both the formalization of power relations and the state’s monopolization of power. I reach this conclusion through an in-depth analysis of the cases of Mexico City, Lima, and Caracas, based on over 20,000 pages of original primary-source data collected from 12 archives with support from the SSRC and the NSF.
In Part I of my dissertation, I examine the relationship between urbanization and formal/informal politics. Since new urban denizens were generally very poor, urban growth took the form of squatter settlements and slums. This put the urban poor in the position of supplicants, requesting permission to live on land over which they lacked legal rights and hoping the state would equip it with urban infrastructure. State and political party officials, meanwhile, sought to harness the new urban poor’s political loyalties to build their bases and coalitions. In all three cases, these different-yet-compatible aims gave rise to a system of reciprocal, informal, and unequal power relations known as “clientelism”: residents lent political elites conditional support, which served political elites’ interests, in exchange for which the state granted residents tacit permission and limited aid, which satisfied the urban poor’s rudimentary needs.
At the center of this system were brokers, who mediated between the urban poor and political officials. In Part II of my dissertation, I focus empirically on these actors to determine whether urban growth furthered the state’s monopolization of power. The case literature shows that sometimes urban brokers were quite powerful. The existing explanatory theories, consistent with classical social theory and political sociology, predict that they would be especially powerful in the cases of Lima or Caracas, but they were instead most powerful in Mexico City. The reason urban brokers were especially powerful in Mexico City, I argue, is that urban growth was more extensive there: the process of urban growth generated conflicts between older and newer generations of residents which drove newer residents into urban brokers’ arms for protection, giving brokers command of followers with which they extended control over settlement turf and extracted resources from residents. Urbanization amidst sharp inequality, that is, made these non-state actors powerful.
Civil society and the state. I also write about two debates at the heart of political sociology and social theory having to do with the relationship between civil society and the state. For at least the past 30 years, civil society—a sphere of voluntary membership groups characterized by within-class heterogeneity and occasional across-class convergence—has been at the center of debates about democracy. Existing research shows that this sphere effloresced during East-Central Europe’s transition from state socialism to capitalism, findings that support static views about the compatibilities or incompatibilities between “modes of production” and forms of social and political organization. In an article in Comparative Sociology, a co-author (Laura J. Enríquez) and I analyze original quantitative and qualitative data to examine the effects on civil society of Venezuela’s 21st century transition towards socialism—a political-economic transition in the opposite direction. We find that this transition also fomented civil society. Since the Venezuelan state advocated socialism but continued to support traditional economic activities, it offered voluntary membership groups myriad ways to define themselves vis-à-vis its alleged socialist project. Doing so made these groups adopt divergent views even when their members hailed from the same class, and to occasionally converge across classes. The transition towards socialism, that is, generated civil society. This conclusion highlights the importance of considering the relationship between political economy and civil society in dynamic rather than static terms.
In another pre-dissertation article, which is currently under review and which builds off of my own previous work, I intervene in the literature on state autonomy. A common approach is to argue that the rule-boundedness of state bureaucracy, so-called “Weberianness,” is a sufficient condition for state autonomy. Through a mixed-methods analysis of the Peruvian state’s legalization of squatters’ residential lands in Lima—the largest extension of so-called “urban citizenship” in history—I show that rule-boundedness is not enough for a state to determine its own priorities. The bureaucracy tasked with this initiative met the criteria for autonomy: it was not coopted or controlled by street-level bureaucrats, and it did not respond to social movement pressures or variations in voting. Nevertheless, during policy implementation it encountered steadfast societal obstacles who slowed state penetration in some quarters, leading the state to allocate these rights disproportionately in the others. So while this bureaucracy met the criteria for autonomy, the state did not determine its own priorities—and therefore cannot really be said to be autonomous. I conclude that to accurately capture how the state impacts society during policy implementation requires seeing the state as but one actor in a field in which it meets with societal resistance on some fronts but not on others.
Methodological and epistemological works. By pushing comparative-historical sociology in new directions in my dissertation, I have been compelled to engage with debates on the subdiscipline’s methods. A previous generation of researchers leveled convincing critiques of both inductive-empiricist and covering-law approaches, and opted to employ alternatives. But we know far less about the implications of the alternatives. Just as we must be aware of statistical assumptions in order to avoid erroneous quantitative analytic conclusions, we should also be aware of the assumptions of the newer comparative-historical methodologies. I evaluate two of them—the negative-case method, which is well known, and the alternative-factors approach, which should be but is not well known—with an eye to their ontological assumptions. I show that since the former strives for explanatory power, it presupposes general laws; and that since the latter aims to identify causal mechanisms that transcend each of the cases studied, it leads the researcher to identify small, quasi-psychological, ones. (This paper is to be included as a chapter in an edited volume on comparative sociology and available on request.)
In a second epistemological paper, I inquire into the proximate social conditions that shape social thought. Sociologists of knowledge have shown that the social conditions in which research is conducted can influence natural scientists’ findings. I turn a similar gaze inward on social theorizing to illuminate how the presence or absence of interlocutors affects conclusions. I examine political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s recent theory of power relations in capitalist workplaces. Motivated by a critique of economists who fail to acknowledge power relations at work, Anderson did not develop her framework in dialogue with scholars who do study economic power relations—an obvious example being Marxist sociologists and historians of work. This approach, which I call “theorizing in isolation,” led Anderson to adopt several stances at odds with those of researchers who study the same topic. Together, these positions comprise a framework that does not form a coherent whole, and which therefore seems to distort more than capture reality. I conclude that to produce accurate theory requires subjecting one’s ideas to the criticism that is implicit in the positions that other theorists have already taken on the given topic.
Urbanization and political development. My dissertation and book project, The Political Development of Urban Clientelism, represents an attempt to rethink the relationship between politics and the growth of cities by centering inequality. Classical social theorists (such as Tönnies and Simmel) consider urban growth a key aspect of societal modernization, oftentimes summarized in the refrain “urban air makes you free”; political sociologists (like Weber and Elias) tend to think that modernization is characterized by the progressive formalization of power relations and state monopolization of political authority, which is perhaps best illustrated by transitions from subjecthood to citizenship. The problem with such accounts, in my view, is that they pay too little attention to inequality. Through an analysis of 20th century Latin America, which experienced the fastest and most extensive urban expansion in world history, I show that when urbanization is concentrated among society’s poorest, it counters both the formalization of power relations and the state’s monopolization of power. I reach this conclusion through an in-depth analysis of the cases of Mexico City, Lima, and Caracas, based on over 20,000 pages of original primary-source data collected from 12 archives with support from the SSRC and the NSF.
In Part I of my dissertation, I examine the relationship between urbanization and formal/informal politics. Since new urban denizens were generally very poor, urban growth took the form of squatter settlements and slums. This put the urban poor in the position of supplicants, requesting permission to live on land over which they lacked legal rights and hoping the state would equip it with urban infrastructure. State and political party officials, meanwhile, sought to harness the new urban poor’s political loyalties to build their bases and coalitions. In all three cases, these different-yet-compatible aims gave rise to a system of reciprocal, informal, and unequal power relations known as “clientelism”: residents lent political elites conditional support, which served political elites’ interests, in exchange for which the state granted residents tacit permission and limited aid, which satisfied the urban poor’s rudimentary needs.
At the center of this system were brokers, who mediated between the urban poor and political officials. In Part II of my dissertation, I focus empirically on these actors to determine whether urban growth furthered the state’s monopolization of power. The case literature shows that sometimes urban brokers were quite powerful. The existing explanatory theories, consistent with classical social theory and political sociology, predict that they would be especially powerful in the cases of Lima or Caracas, but they were instead most powerful in Mexico City. The reason urban brokers were especially powerful in Mexico City, I argue, is that urban growth was more extensive there: the process of urban growth generated conflicts between older and newer generations of residents which drove newer residents into urban brokers’ arms for protection, giving brokers command of followers with which they extended control over settlement turf and extracted resources from residents. Urbanization amidst sharp inequality, that is, made these non-state actors powerful.
Civil society and the state. I also write about two debates at the heart of political sociology and social theory having to do with the relationship between civil society and the state. For at least the past 30 years, civil society—a sphere of voluntary membership groups characterized by within-class heterogeneity and occasional across-class convergence—has been at the center of debates about democracy. Existing research shows that this sphere effloresced during East-Central Europe’s transition from state socialism to capitalism, findings that support static views about the compatibilities or incompatibilities between “modes of production” and forms of social and political organization. In an article in Comparative Sociology, a co-author (Laura J. Enríquez) and I analyze original quantitative and qualitative data to examine the effects on civil society of Venezuela’s 21st century transition towards socialism—a political-economic transition in the opposite direction. We find that this transition also fomented civil society. Since the Venezuelan state advocated socialism but continued to support traditional economic activities, it offered voluntary membership groups myriad ways to define themselves vis-à-vis its alleged socialist project. Doing so made these groups adopt divergent views even when their members hailed from the same class, and to occasionally converge across classes. The transition towards socialism, that is, generated civil society. This conclusion highlights the importance of considering the relationship between political economy and civil society in dynamic rather than static terms.
In another pre-dissertation article, which is currently under review and which builds off of my own previous work, I intervene in the literature on state autonomy. A common approach is to argue that the rule-boundedness of state bureaucracy, so-called “Weberianness,” is a sufficient condition for state autonomy. Through a mixed-methods analysis of the Peruvian state’s legalization of squatters’ residential lands in Lima—the largest extension of so-called “urban citizenship” in history—I show that rule-boundedness is not enough for a state to determine its own priorities. The bureaucracy tasked with this initiative met the criteria for autonomy: it was not coopted or controlled by street-level bureaucrats, and it did not respond to social movement pressures or variations in voting. Nevertheless, during policy implementation it encountered steadfast societal obstacles who slowed state penetration in some quarters, leading the state to allocate these rights disproportionately in the others. So while this bureaucracy met the criteria for autonomy, the state did not determine its own priorities—and therefore cannot really be said to be autonomous. I conclude that to accurately capture how the state impacts society during policy implementation requires seeing the state as but one actor in a field in which it meets with societal resistance on some fronts but not on others.
Methodological and epistemological works. By pushing comparative-historical sociology in new directions in my dissertation, I have been compelled to engage with debates on the subdiscipline’s methods. A previous generation of researchers leveled convincing critiques of both inductive-empiricist and covering-law approaches, and opted to employ alternatives. But we know far less about the implications of the alternatives. Just as we must be aware of statistical assumptions in order to avoid erroneous quantitative analytic conclusions, we should also be aware of the assumptions of the newer comparative-historical methodologies. I evaluate two of them—the negative-case method, which is well known, and the alternative-factors approach, which should be but is not well known—with an eye to their ontological assumptions. I show that since the former strives for explanatory power, it presupposes general laws; and that since the latter aims to identify causal mechanisms that transcend each of the cases studied, it leads the researcher to identify small, quasi-psychological, ones. (This paper is to be included as a chapter in an edited volume on comparative sociology and available on request.)
In a second epistemological paper, I inquire into the proximate social conditions that shape social thought. Sociologists of knowledge have shown that the social conditions in which research is conducted can influence natural scientists’ findings. I turn a similar gaze inward on social theorizing to illuminate how the presence or absence of interlocutors affects conclusions. I examine political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s recent theory of power relations in capitalist workplaces. Motivated by a critique of economists who fail to acknowledge power relations at work, Anderson did not develop her framework in dialogue with scholars who do study economic power relations—an obvious example being Marxist sociologists and historians of work. This approach, which I call “theorizing in isolation,” led Anderson to adopt several stances at odds with those of researchers who study the same topic. Together, these positions comprise a framework that does not form a coherent whole, and which therefore seems to distort more than capture reality. I conclude that to produce accurate theory requires subjecting one’s ideas to the criticism that is implicit in the positions that other theorists have already taken on the given topic.
