Ongoing Work

How do rulers distribute goods to elites to avoid conflict? Exigent scholarship argues that land grants can act as a credible commitment device for the monarch and elites, but also imbue elites with the capacity to rebel in the future. This paper is the first to directly test the credible commitment effect of land distribution in reducing conflict in Europe. Using micro-level evidence from three novel data sets covering England from 1226 to 1572 that: collect land grants from 480,000 charters and patents granted to elites in English counties, determine rebellious counties for 32 civil conflicts, and identify 502 elites and all the grants they received before the Second Barons’ War, the paper examines whether distributing land insulated European autocrats from elite revolt. Elite-level results show that elites who received land grants in the years preceding the Second Barons’ War were less likely to rebel. County-level difference-in-difference analyses show a decrease in the probability of a county rebelling in the years immediately following receiving grants of manors, but castle grants do not alter the probability of rebellion.

Historical scholarship documents the contours of the Great Migration, the movement of millions of black people out of the American South between 1910-1970. Political science literature focuses on the political behaviors of residents after black migrants arrive. Deviating from this perspective, we focus on the strategic reasons for black people to migrate and the factors drawing them to particular locations. We theorize migration from violence and economic distress compelled black migrants to travel different distances and seek different institutions. We leverage micro-census data between 1900-1930 to trace the movement of millions of black individuals after lynchings and the introduction of the boll weevil pest, combined with novel measures of civil society. Black individuals experiencing lynching migrated within the South. Individuals experiencing the boll weevil migrated out of state and to the North and also moved to areas with strong black civil society.

Do brothers/uncles destabilize autocracies? Violent examples of uncles of autocrats murdering their nephews to take power themselves suggest that autocracies face acute threats from within via monarchs' brothers and uncles. Through a novel dataset on all legitimate and illegitimate siblings of monarchs from 32 European polities between 1000 and 1800, I employ a quasi-experimental design leveraging. I monarchs with brothers to those with sisters to evaluate if brothers of monarchs/uncles of crown princes threaten existing regimes and monarch's sons. Then, with a novel dataset on abrupt and exogenous natural deaths of monarchs, I evaluate whether brothers threaten the stability of the next reign with their royal brothers now removed. In neither case are brothers more destabilizing to regimes than sisters. In fact, through personalistic powersharing arrangements, monarchs can protect their sons and translate their ambitious brothers into stabilizing actors. Using a third novel dataset on secular and ecclesiastical appointments to royal brothers, I find that appointments of royal brothers to dukedoms and bishoprics stabilize monarchs' reigns and their successor reigns. In short, uncles are not evil, just buyable.