Essays in Political Economy

Abstract

The three papers of this dissertation combine novel data sourced from archives and historical sources with empirical methodologies to generate insights with contemporary relevance to topics in political economy. In the first paper, Expert-Policymaker Interactions: Evidence from Public Health, I examine the interactions of scientists and policymakers during nineteenth-century cholera pandemics and how health experts juggled the dual, sometimes competing, obligations to advance science on one hand and to craft policy on the other. In the second paper, Conflict Technology as a Catalyst of State Formation (with Michael-David Mangini), we examine the impact of the development of artillery on political development. We theorize that artillery raised the economies of scale in the provision of defense, contributing to the rise of the modern state in Europe, and test our theory using data on the fortification timelines for over 6,000 European towns and cities. In the third paper, Mobilizing the Home Front: The Impact of War on Women’s Political Activism, I digitize data on thousands of women’s volunteer organizations in the American Civil War to examine the links between wartime volunteering and American women’s participation in mass politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.