David Thunder: Sovereign Rule and the Still-Birth of Freedom

Professor Bednar’s research is on the analysis of institutions, focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of the stability of federal states.  Her most recent book,The Robust Federation demonstrates how complementary institutions maintain and adjust the distribution of authority between national and state governments. 

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity?

This paper focuses on the intellectual sources of the transformation of the state. It suggests that modernist social science informed the main narratives of the crisis of the administrative and welfare state in the 1970s, and modernist social science also inspired the waves of public sector reform that responded to this crisis.

Dr. Charnysh’s research focuses on historical political economy, legacies of violence, nation- and state-building, and ethnic politics. Her book project examines the long-run effects of forced migration in the aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe, synthesizing several decades of micro-level data collected during a year of fieldwork in Poland, funded by the Social Science Research Council and Center for European Studies.