Dissertation
Land Tenure in Uganda: My dissertation compares modern land law with land law negotiations circa 1900. In land law, as in all institutions, those
with the most to gain/lose have an incentive to become involved. Land law creates political/economic winners and losers, and the people
involved in making the law are aware of how it will affect their interests. Land law circa 1900 benefited the British and a select group of
traditional rulers just as land law 1998/2004 has benefited a select group of urban and politically connected Ugandans. For this research, I
spent 9 months in Uganda collecting interviews with farmers, land officers, and representatives from traditional institutions.
Offshoot project: I foresee my dissertation yielding a series of journal articles with a similar theoretic focus. First, I would like to formalize the
negotiation that took place between the British Colonial government and the Buganda Kingdom circa 1900. The next step is comparing this
negotiation with the debates/negotiation that took place between the NRM and its opposition concerning the 1998 Land Law and its subsequent
amendments.
Other Projects
1. Comparative (re)districting: using open source software and fairness indicators (used frequently in American Politics), I evaluate
how leaders draw districts/counties in African states.
2. Comparative Electoral Fraud: here i use Benford's law to inspect elections in Uganda in the current regime. Benford's law, used by the IRS to detect tax fraud, has also been used in political science http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799846
3. NGO market entry: in this paper, I combine interviews and formal theory to explain when an NGO decides to legalize its participation in
a 'market'.