Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Explaining and Designing Transitional Justice after the Third Wave of Democratization

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation proposal examines the exchange of public sector jobs for political support in two developing democracies. By analyzing the politics of public employment in Argentina and Turkey, the investigator will shed light on how political and socio-economic factors shape incentives and abilities of politicians (parties) to distribute public jobs in a particularistic manner rather than following universalistic criteria like merit and education. The intellectual contribution of the research stems from its efforts to address both empirical and theoretical limitations in the existing literature. Empirically, the dependent variable in the previous research was presented either ambiguously or too broadly. This research will define the dependent variable more clearly and specifically as "the particularistic distribution of public jobs for political support". Theoretically, the literature has failed to differentiate between different types of political support while analyzing the political and socio-economic factors that lead to this type of exchange. Consequently, this led to inaccuracies in identifying the explanatory variables. To fill this gap, this research differentiates between two types of political support: votes from the citizens in the elections and support within a party by other party members. Through the analysis of intra-party politics when the recipient of the favor is a party member and of electoral politics when the job is given to a voter, this research will introduce explanatory variables that have been neglected in the literature. The project proposes the labor market structure and the organization of the intra-party politics as the two most important variables that perpetuate particularism and favoritism in the allocation of public jobs. The empirical analysis of these hypotheses will include district level statistical analysis for both countries and interviews with party members. The broader impact of this research occurs in the following ways. In addition to the theoretical goals, this research will construct a database that includes district level socio-economic and political variables for two countries, Argentina and Turkey. The method of statistical analysis across different geographical locations within a country is increasingly being used in political science. It is a recent development, however, and systematic collection of district level data is lacking for most countries. It is actually completely missing for some countries like Turkey. This research fills this gap by providing such a database for two countries. As such, another broader impact of the project will be to provide a database that will make future research on these two countries easier.