Research

This paper investigates how critical junctures reshape the dynamics of political mobilization. I study the impact of casualties in the American Civil War on support for the women’s suffrage movement, constructing a novel, granular dataset of Union soldiers and their wartime experience. I locate these soldiers to their town of residence and show that people from towns with higher Civil War casualty rates were less likely to petition for women’s suffrage in the following years. By comparing pre- and post war data, I show that the war shifted local political priorities and provide evidence of two mechanisms for this result. First, Northern towns with higher casualties became more attuned to the salience of Black rights, which the Civil War was fought over, resulting in a prioritization of this movement over women’s suffrage. Second, the collective trauma of casualties and male sacrifice in the war reinforced pre-war gender norms of separate spheres, reducing support for women’s political empowerment.

We conduct a field experiment with Ugandan forest users to elucidate the impact of land tenure security on deforestation. One-third of participants faced a threat of eviction, one third had the option to secure tenure through costly certification, and one-third faced secure tenure. The results show that insecure tenure increases tree extraction by 23%, while certification reduces that effect by half. The conservation effects of certification are intensified for participants with a lived experience of land tenure insecurity generated by overlapping land rights. Our findings demonstrate that land certification can improve environmental outcomes and that these effects may be amplified by historical legacies of insecurity.

Does compulsory voting (CV) benefit the left? Scholars have long hypothesized that it should, since the people mobilized by the reform should support leftist parties. Yet recent work reveals a puzzling finding: in places where turnout rose because of CV, the left lost relative to places where turnout fell. This paper argues that these results have puzzled scholars because the implicit referent in their theory is working class men. Instead, we suggest that CV could mobilize other citizens with conservative values, for example, rural women. Revisiting the Australian case, which instituted compulsory voting in a staggered fashion throughout the twentieth century, we show that CV increased women's vote share relative to men and that in rural areas where this was most pronounced the left performed worse. Ultimately, we argue that lasting puzzles in comparative politics can be solved by de-centering men in the "identification imaginary".

This paper examines the emergence of abortion as a public moral crisis in nineteenth-century America. After the Civil War public anxiety was rising in the face of rising demographic competition from migrants, class inequality from industrialization, and changing gender roles. We argue that the economic interests of elites meant they had little interest in restricting immigration or industrial expansion, so instead they sought to redirect public anxiety around these issues toward regulating women's reproductive behavior. The result was a raft of legislation, including the Comstock Act, that entrenched abortion as a moral and political issue for decades. We show that in areas with higher migration abortion is a more important issue in media discourse, analysing content of newspaper articles to quantify media attention. This case highlights how moral panics can arise less from popular demand than from elite incentives to reframe social and demographic challenges.

How do conservative movements succeed in blocking reforms that are now so widely recognized as beneficial? This project investigates the politics of resistance to women’s suffrage in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Despite repeated parliamentary votes and sustained activism by suffragists, opponents of reform consistently prevailed, supported by a nationwide anti-suffrage movement and sympathetic press. Using newly compiled data on anti-suffrage petitions, branch locations of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, and newspaper sentiment, I will trace how local hostility to women’s political rights was activated and sustained. To complement this analysis, I will study the role of elites with evidence from MP votes and speeches, linking their opposition to party strategy, their backgrounds, and career incentives. I aim with this research to advance our understanding not only of a vital part of women’s suffrage history but also how movements can transform social norms into active political resistance, with implications for the study of conservative movements more broadly.