[Tlc] TLC-Walter Dean Burnham Dissertation Award

[justinm at ucr.edu]

FYI. Congratuations to Dr. Larsson!
Best,
justin

The winner of the inaugural Walter Dean Burnham Dissertation Award is 
Tomas Henrik Larsson for his January 2007 Cornell University Ph.D. 
dissertation on "Capitalizing Thailand: Colonialism, Communism, and the 
Political Economy of Rural Land Rights."

"Capitalizing Thailand" is a riveting analysis of the evolution of land 
rights in Thailand, examining changes from the global era of colonialism 
in the late nineteenth century through the Cold War period of the late 
twentieth century.  The analysis addresses important theoretical issues 
in the political economy of development with detailed archival and field 
evidence from different eras of Thai history, supplemented by 
strategically chosen cross-national comparisons to other developing 
nations in Asia and Africa.  Larsson's thesis shows how geopolitical 
circumstances interact with domestic social structures to shape the 
choices of government rulers about the institutionalization of property 
rights--a matter widely recognized as crucial to economic development.  
The empirical findings are provocative and counterintuitive.  Larsson 
shows that during the colonial era, the Thai state defended its 
sovereignty by defending local property rights in ways that promoted 
social stability and blocked foreign economic penetration, yet also 
retarded economic growth.  Only later, when communist insurgents 
threatened in the 1960s, did the Thai authorities find it in their 
interest to clarify private property rights and facilitate economic 
modernization.

Methodologically, this thesis uses an apparently anomalous case to 
challenge and refine received theoretical wisdom, showing how an 
historical-institutionalist approach, sensitive to contexts and 
sequences, can improve upon standard rational-choice models of state 
choices about property rights.  Even though the issues seem at first 
glance arcane and Thailand is a country not familiar to most scholarly 
readers, Larsson writes in a crisp and quietly dramatic manner, allowing 
the stakes to become clear and the findings to gain credibility step by 
step.  "Capitalizing Thailand" is a model work in international 
political economy and historical-institutionalist comparative politics, 
by a scholar who has shown a remarkable ability to synthesize primary 
fieldwork in a difficult language with archival investigations and 
secondary comparisons.


______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
3046 INTN
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu