New Faculty

Victor Menaldo

The department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Victor Menaldo (Stanford University, Ph. D. 2009) will be joining us as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2010.

He specializes in comparative politics, with an emphasis on the political economy of development. Menaldo's research focuses on four substantive issues: states' capacity to tax and redistribute wealth and income, the political economy of autocratic regimes, the politics of democratic transition, and the so-called resource curse.

He examines how the transaction costs of taxing income, profits, and capital condition a state’s ability to levy direct taxes and engage in fiscal redistribution. He studies how dictators take and sustain power, and how their survival strategy affects property rights, investment, and growth. He explores how outgoing elites under autocracy orchestrate and manipulate the democratic transition process. Finally, by taking a historical approach to the data and a dynamic approach to extant empirical models of the resource curse, Menaldo reevaluates whether natural resource reliance actually harms democracy, catalyzes civil wars, and lowers economic growth.


Rebecca Thorpe

Rebecca U. Thorpe (Ph.D., University of Maryland, Fall 2009) will be joining the faculty at the University of Washington as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2010. She was a Research Fellow at The Brookings Institution from 2008-2009 where she completed research for her dissertation project, “The Welfare-Warfare State: Perpetuating the U.S. Military Economy.” During the 2009-2010 academic year she worked on Capitol Hill as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow.

Her research focuses on national political institutions and power relations, with a particular emphasis on how institutional structures influence policymaking and regime development. Her dissertation examines the rise of the U.S. military industry during and after World War II, and its effects on the political and economic incentives of policymakers to extend defense procurement expenditures independent of their ideology or national security goals. The research involves several original data collections and analysis of archival documents dating back to the constitutional founding. She introduces a new theory of disproportionate economic reliance, which posits that more economically homogenous, rural areas experience greater dependence on existing defense infrastructure than industrially diverse, urban areas with an equal defense sector presence. Analysis of several original datasets that include the nationwide locations of commercial defense facilities provide new evidence that disproportionate local reliance is a key driver of congressional support for various types of weapons expenditures, and these members’ preferences go on to influence the allocation of defense subcontracts. Employing extensive historical analysis, she argues that congressional interests in perpetuating defense resources promote greater executive independence over U.S. military actions. The analysis suggests that coinciding interests in defense sector expansion concentrate resources and authority in the executive branch, weakening the system of checks and balances. 

Thorpe is also involved in several multi-year, NSF-funded projects utilizing computational linguistics and informational retrieval techniques to build, categorize and analyze a comprehensive database of U.S. Supreme Court documents.