Nikola Mirilovic
Dissertation Abstract:
My dissertation, entitled Regime
Type, Security and the Politics of Migration, deals with questions of war
and peace, fills key gaps in our understanding of globalization and clarifies
how and why democracy matters. The dissertation consists of three interrelated
but self-contained papers on immigration, emigration, and military manpower
policymaking, respectively. My central claim is that dictatorship and large-scale
international security threats lead states to adopt permissive immigration
and/or restrictive emigration policies. I conduct two kinds of testing: I
examine modern data using econometrics and analyze macrohistorical trends over
the last three hundred years. The statistical findings are original due
to a lack of large n cross-national work on either immigration or emigration
policymaking. The dissertation makes an important original contribution, as the
links between security and migration, immigration policymaking under
dictatorship, and the politics of emigration, have been largely ignored.
Refereed Publications:
“Explaining the Politics of
Immigration: Dictatorship, Development, and Defense.” Comparative Politics
[forthcoming].
My next research project, entitled
“Regime Type, Urban Bias and Internal Migration Restrictions,” is on the
politics of regulating internal migration. Internal migration restrictions are
understudied even though they are widespread and even though they affect
important phenomena, such as urbanization and economic development.
Dictatorships are more likely to impose such restrictions than democracies.
Dictatorships are less likely to face opposition to internal migration
restrictions from an independent judiciary. Furthermore, authoritarian elites
tend to adopt policies that benefit a city or a region where their supporters
are concentrated at the expense of the rest of the country. Migration from
disadvantaged areas into favored areas can undermine such policies. The results
of original cross-national econometric testing using post-World War II data are
consistent with the above claims. I presented a draft of this paper at the 2009
meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.
Most broadly, my research interests are located at the intersection between comparative politics and international relations as I am interested in political economy, international security and the interactions between them. A particular set of theoretical questions I plan to pursue further over the long term pertain to international and domestic politics of authoritarian states. Dictatorship is often treated as a residual category consisting of non-democracies. I plan to address the questions of how dictatorships function, what key authoritarian sub-types exist, and how to explain the differences between them. Furthermore, I am interested in how regime type variation (democracy/dictatorship) and the differences between authoritarian subtypes affect international policymaking. For example, the literature on the causes of war (e.g., the democratic peace theory) is often based on theories of democratic policymaking while treating dictatorship as a residual category. Regime type also affects how states prepare for war; I plan to further explore the links between regime type variation and conscription. In terms of empirics, my long-term plan is to continue to expand testing to contexts other than contemporary Western democracies. Social scientists often test their theories in this context not because their argument demands it, but because of data availability. I plan to continue to construct historical indicators which extend to the 19th century and are global in scope.