research agenda

I study how institutions change when authority is contested from below. Across most of human history the rules that govern political and economic life have not been produced solely by elite bargains, constitutional conventions, or external shocks; they have also been produced by the structured action of dispersed agents who withdraw, redirect, or reorganize the cooperation on which authority depends. My research asks how this happens, what determines whether bottom-up contestation produces inclusive or extractive institutional packages, and who is incorporated into the resulting order.

The program sits at the intersection of three established traditions in institutional economics. From the New Institutional Economics (Douglass North; Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson) it inherits the question of how political institutions generate long-run differences in economic performance. From the Bloomington tradition (Elinor Ostrom) it inherits the conviction that order can emerge polycentrically, through dispersed, partly coordinated problem-solving, rather than only through centralized command. From the Virginia school of constitutional political economy (James Buchanan; Peter Boettke) it inherits a focus on rules, emergent order, and the political economy of institutional choice. Threading these together is a single puzzle: regimes ultimately depend on the cooperation of those they govern, and how that cooperation is produced, withdrawn, or reorganized determines whether the institutions left behind are durable, inclusive, and growth-conducive — or fragile, extractive, and brittle.

My work approaches this puzzle through four interlocking questions. The first concerns the mechanisms of legitimacy: what cultural, ideational, and structural substrates (folklore, religion, ideas, dignity, communication networks, gender norms) make the coordinated withdrawal of consent thinkable, and why do those substrates differ across societies? The second concerns the modes of institutional transition: what distinguishes nonviolent mass mobilization from violent revolt, elite pact, or coup, and why do some societies reach for one mode rather than another? The third concerns the institutional aftermath: what packages of de jure and de facto rules (economic freedom, polyarchy, property rights, corruption levels, legal origins) follow from different modes of transition, and how durable are they? The fourth concerns distributional incorporation: who is enfranchised by institutional change and who is left out, with gender as the lead axis and students, religious minorities, and economically peripheral regions as natural extensions.

The same theoretical core extends well beyond regime change. Entrepreneurship under institutional constraint, decentralized digital governance experiments such as decentralized autonomous organizations, and the role of universities and civic institutions in regional renewal all instantiate the same underlying claim: that durable institutional order is built and sustained from below, by dispersed agents whose decisions to cooperate, exit, or innovate around constraints accumulate into the rules of the game. 

In short, I study how regimes end and institutions begin, and what determines whether the result is an inclusive, durable order or a return to extraction under new management. The selected articles below trace its central themes.