When Redistribution Backfires Politically: Land Reform in Portugal

Sachaet Pandey, 2023-24 Lloyd & Susanne Rudolph Field Research Fellow, and Elizabeth Chatterjee examine the 1967 Koyna earthquake in Maharashtra, India which was caused in part by the Koyna dam, a large hydroelectric dam built nearby. Chatterjee and Pandey investigate the dynamic of the Anthropocene and a movement that positions humans as a ‘geophysical’ force, using the Maharashtra earthquake as a key opportunity for inquiry. This examination uses the earthquake to move beyond the Anthropocene's focus on climate change, draw out key themes and tensions, and explore the contributions of Indian scientists at the time to investigate the postcolonial implications of humans as a geophysical and planetary-shaping force. The authors pose that the Koyna earthquake provides an initial case for examining agency and the geophysical together, implicating human and more-than-human interactions. The postcolonial context of India’s energy ambitions made pushing aside the potential human role in this earthquake essential, masking investigations of the two together. Chatterjee and Pandey explore these tensions as a foundational example for debates on the Anthropocene that are central in today’s overlapping environmental crises. Essential to this understanding is the environmental history of the region and the significance of the site of the Konya dam as a ‘geotechnical assemblage’ of technology, and geography. The 1967 Koyna earthquake triggered debates among the seismology and Earth Science communities about the cause of the earthquake and new modes of inquiry for earthquakes overall. In a sense, the Koyna earthquake ushered in a new era of scientific and policy debate about projects that could trigger earthquakes and their implications. In their examination, Chatterjee and Pandey pose that the Earth, remade with geotechnical projects, has become a site of relations for human and other-than-human agential actors on enormous temporal and spatial scales.  

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Gendered Employment Trajectories and Health in Liberal Regime Countries

2021-22 CISSR Dissertation Fellow Ariel Azar examines employment-related characteristics and health in liberal welfare states, specifically the United States, Chile, Switzerland, and England. Azar discusses the shortage of cross-national comparative research and previous studies limited to single liberal welfare states. He aims to provide a more comprehensive multi-national analysis for future scholars. This article produces key research insights about the link between positive later-life health and standard employment trajectories characterized by full-time employment. Additionally, Azar investigates if positive later-life health is more frequent among men or women with standard employment trajectories or if the opposite was driven by non-standard employment trajectories. Azar’s analytical strategy comprises three stages. First, Azar created employment trajectories within each country utilizing sequence analysis, a method that facilitates comparison and classification of similar sequences within the employment domain. Second, the study uses a bivariate association technique –– the statistical relationship between two variables, where the values of one variable are paired with the values of the other –– to estimate the relationship between employment trajectories and health indicators in each country. Lastly, the article estimates multivariate linear and logistic regression models to predict the probability of reporting each health outcome by employment trajectory in each country.

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Political Effects of State Led Repression

2017-18 CISSR Faculty Fellow Maria Bautista provides new insights on the long-term effects of state-led repression in Chile. Bautista highlights the various ways in which authoritarian regimes use repressive tactics to perpetuate themselves in power, while eliminating and demobilizing their political opponents. As a result of repression, Bautista finds that people are less likely to engage in collective action against the state and more likely to fear expression of alternative views due to the threat of violence. Bautista acknowledges the sparse evidence in previous research regarding the impact of repression on individual political behavior and ideology, as well as whether any of these effects continue after a repressive regime leaves power. The article aims to address these gaps in the literature through the collection of an expansive dataset in Chile, surveying subjects who experienced repression by the military dictatorship which ran the country between 1973 to 1990. Through this fieldwork, Bautista argues that repression leads people to be less likely to join political parties, regardless of left or right leaning policies, and protest –– perhaps a result of persistent trauma caused by the experience of violence from the state. This research yields 2 main sets of results. The first is that repressed people do not differentially change their political beliefs or ideology on a left-right scale, and neither conform to the ideology of the party in power nor produce backlash against said party. The second significant finding is that even after a dictatorship has left power, repression leads to a lower probability of membership of the repressed in political parties relative to non-repressed groups.

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Accidentally Emboldened: Industrial Workers between Democracy and Despotism on the Shop Floor in Wuhan, China (1984–1985)

Yueran Zhang, Assistant Professor of Sociology and 2025-2026 CISSR Faculty Fellow examines key tensions in 1980s industrial factories in Wuhan. Zhang builds on work about China’s industrial politics in the post-Mao era by exploring two contradictory tendencies: the consolidation of despotism in the workplace and mechanisms that strengthened democratic participation for workers in the workplace. Situated in Wuhan between 1984 and 1985, Zhang provides historical background for the paradoxical tensions between despotism and democratic participation and seeks to answer how workers navigated this period on the factory floor, placing the worker as a key agential figure. This presents a new perspective from existing literature on the workplace in the post-Mao era, which generally centers policy analysis. Zhang examines historical archives, policy intentions, and the grassroots dynamics on the factory floor to paint a cohesive picture of these tensions. In line with the intended despotic rule of the factory, democratic processes for electing factory leaders were introduced as a facade to accomplish goals prescribed by the state. This facade, Zhang writes, “accidentally” ushered in actual democratic practices among workers. The consequence of this new examination, Zhang writes, is a new way of understanding the post-Mao reform era in China and the grassroots implications of top-down despotic imposition when combined with some democratic reforms in the workplace. Elaborating on one unintended consequence of planned factory elections, Zhan explains that workers often took democracy claims more seriously than government authorities intended, and outside of the parameters of official government control, even inciting desires and activism for more material resources and vacations.  

Read Zhang’s article here.