I am the Resident Director of Washington University in St. Louis‘ Program in Chile. I am also an Adjust Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt: “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944.
Substantive Research Interests
My research focuses on the political economy of developing countries. I seek to understand how subnational constituent interests, electoral systems, and political competition influence the process of trade policy formation, economic integration, and the provision of public goods. Special interests, including the middle class, often manage to wield their political clout to the detriment of others, while politicians, seeking to help or garner the political support of the poor, inadvertently line the pockets of the rich. Understanding which groups receive preferential treatment is a basis for understanding the structure of power in society and for finding solutions to the problems facing the world’s most vulnerable groups.
Methodological Interests
A significant aspect of my research agenda has focused on developing innovative measures that accurately represent the phenomena under study. I am also interested in in the visual display of scientific information, particularly the illustration of substantive findings from statistical models. I am particularly concerned that our ceteris paribus interpretation of regression coefficients, even in linear models, may lead us to erroneous conclusions when the conditional independence assumption requires a very cooperative empirical world, far from the social world that we know.