Research Workshop in Political Economy (Gov 3007)

This seminar is closed to the public. Co-taught by Professors Robert Bates, Torben Iversen, and Pia Raffler, the Research Workshop in Political Economy (Government 3007) is a year-long graduate seminar that aims to encourage cross-disciplinary research and excellence in graduate training. Political economy is a research tradition that explores how institutions affect political and economic outcomes. The workshop emphasizes the development of dissertation proposals and is a place where graduate students can present their research to an audience of committed and informed peers. It is open to graduate students in the Departments of Government and Economics, and the Program in Political Economy and Government. The workshop holds both internal and public seminars and meetings. At the internal meetings, approximately twelve per semester, graduate students and faculty present their own work to one another. At the public meetings, up to two per semester, leading scholars are invited to Harvard to present their work. Although the workshop is by invitation only, affiliates of the Weatherhead Center are encouraged to attend the public meetings. First, Matias López will present “Unexpected expropriators: how elites came to support agrarian reform.” Next, Max Winkler will have a brainstorming session for his project “Economic Development and Moral Values.” ------- Abstract for “Unexpected expropriators: how elites came to support agrarian reform” Recent theories of agrarian reform assume that, in a democracy, economic elites and the right-wing politicians that represent them share a common interest of protecting property rights from redisbustrive demands. Focusing on the case of Brazil, we explore a scenario where right-wing politicians developed sympathy toward the idea of agrarian reform after the democratic transition, antagonizing the interests of economic elites with rural ties. Using data from elite surveys, in-depth interviews, and archives we show that right-wing politicians came to endorse agrarian reform, with the blessings of the urban economic elites, as a response to distributive conflict. The unexpected support for land expropriation is conditioned by the level of social conflict, the electoral menace of the left, and the strength of rural ties among elites. We challenge the idea of elites as a naturally cohesive group and show that right-wing politicians and urban economic elites presented little solidarity toward agrarian elites, forcing them to coordinate in more effective ways to protect themselves, not from the poor, but from other elites. Abstract for “Economic Development and Moral Values” Do economic shocks affect moral values -- people's beliefs about "right" and "wrong? While the relationship between economic conditions and moral values has long been of great interest across the social sciences, causal empirical evidence is scarce. Guided by an influential recent framework in moral psychology, I draw on historical local newspapers to construct a novel panel dataset with county-level measures of moral values. When finished, I will exploit exogenous variation in local weather conditions, market access, and immigration to obtain causal estimates of the effects on moral values.