New Faculty

Victor Menaldo

Department of Political Science is delighted to announce that Victor Menaldo (Stanford University, Ph. D. 2009) will be joining the department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2009. Menaldo's dissertation addresses a major issue in comparative political economy: the relationship between democratization and fiscal redistribution. Menaldo develops a theoretical model that departs from the extant, "frictionless" political economy approach to redistribution.  He posits that unequal, developing societies often face high transaction costs to taxing income, profits and capital gains -- a phenomenon that pronounces itself shortly after independence, and may become worse upon democratization: in the wake of shorter time horizons induced by electoral competition.  Only democracies that can mitigate these transaction costs can sustain progressive tax systems and afford redistributive social spending.  However, even in a context of low ransaction costs, constitutional engineering can limit the degree of redistribution usually expected under democracy.  To test the implications of his theory, he combines in-depth historical evidence with a rich and original data set of Latin America's tax structures and public spending since the 19th century.  By clarifying the scope conditions, and identifying different institutional starting points for democracy, he is able to offer a nuanced and convincing argument about when democratic transitions will and will not produce redistribution.

Menaldo is also co-authoring several papers that are highly skeptical of the so-called Resource Curse.  With Stephen Haber, he identifies the theoretical and methodological shortcomings that beset extant work on the claim that natural resource reliance causes countries to tax their citizens less -- become rentier states -- and undermine and prevent democracy.  He finds that if one specifies the correct counterfactual, and focuses on the actual historical trajectory of resource rich countries, there is no evidence for a resource curse and some evidence of a resource blessing.  With Sam Seljan, he takes a similar approach to the claim that oil provokes civil war, and finds no relationship between new oil discoveries and wars aimed at capturing the state and a surprising decrease in the odds of secessionist conflict.