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. The elite-level results show that elites who received land grants in the ten years preceding the Second Barons’ War were 48.6 percentage points less likely to rebel. Preliminary county-level results show a decrease in the probability of a county rebelling in the years immediately following receiving the grant, but an increase in the probability of rebellion in future years.

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? Historical work on European monarchies highlights how ambitious uncles can gruesomely depose their nephews in hereditary succession regimes to take the throne for themselves. But this work clashes with growing work in political science that shows the stabilizing effects of succession rules and family members. I argue that royal brothers act as trusted allies and agents to the monarch, for a price. Royal brothers who receive some power-sharing arrangement through noble titles, ecclesiastical positions, or lucrative marriages are those likely to stabilize their brothers and nephews' reigns. This paper presents new data on monarch-brother power-sharing arrangements for over 1,500 monarch siblings across 32 European monarchies from 1000 to 1800. Combined with novel measures of monarch natural deaths, I leverage a quasi-experimental design to show the effect of having brothers on the probability of violence during the monarch's reign and the years immediately after.