The New Dissertation Topic

I admit it: I'm pretty jazzed about this topic, and, perhaps most importantly, so is my advisor. To set it all up for you--to let you feel the jazz--I explain a few things first:

1) I was a cultural anthro major as an undergrad, and grew quite interested in economic development--more for damage control vis-a-vis the World Bank--and thus picked up economics as my second major. I worked as a research assistant for a famous-y anthro professor who ran economic experiments in Africa, US cities and US rural areas.

2) In the anthro classes, we reveled in poking fun at the economics/business/development folk who claimed that the backwards cultures of Africans prohibited their economic success. Many an anthropologist's study proved that these backward cultures were usually rational behaviors given the different environment or context in which they lived. For instance, the very ornate and 'religious' ceremonies directing Bali's irrigation system (The famous Water Temples) were actually not religious schmreligious hullaballoo, but rather a finely tuned and intricate system which had taken into account a vast array of parameters, such as the different insects to be restrained, the different crops to be yielded, etc. Though they may have taken on religious language (a "high priest" who directed the water, the "temples", etc), they were actually amazingly efficient at maximizing crop yeild given all of these various parameters. The Green Scientists then came in with the mission of "modernizing" the temples in accordance with Western farming practices--the crops were ruined, fishies died, and took a few farmers with them. The Green Scientists just hadn't taken into account the different environment--the different physical environment--in which this farming was to take place.


3) People look at Iraq or Africa today and scratch their heads about why people would choose to vote down ethnic lines. It is generally assumed that these regions will always vote down ethnic lines because it is in their culture to 'stick' to their own, so to speak. The first gross misgeneralization of Iraq is that Saddam only gave pork or goodies/jobs to his Sunni compatriots; in fact, Saddam was more interested in giving stuffs to members of his tribe, which, of course, happened to be more Sunni than Shia or Kurdish. However, if one drew out the Iraqi geneology chart, one would see that the amount of stuffs given to an Iraqi citizen depended on the number of genes shared with their leader.

4) People use heuristics when making decisions; that is, you use an information shortcut. This is why many Americans vote down party lines; it lowers the cost of gathering information about candidate platforms. It's a rough measure of a candidate's actual preferences, but (and especially in polarized times such as these) it seems to work well enough given the 'stakes' of choosing one's House member.

4) Rural Africa is a low-information environment. That is, there is not free and easy access to newspapers, television news, etc. For many weeks in the rainy season, there may be little to no contact with the surrounding areas, as the roads are easily flooded and many areas operate without electricity (low infrastructure capacity). One heuristic which is easily attainable at the voting booth is the candidate's ethnicity. This is a heuristic which is used in America to some degree (it's called voting on descriptive characteristics--"I'm black, so I will vote for a black person if one is running." "I'm a woman, so I will vote for a woman if one is running.")

5) In early America, there was no choice for descriptive characteristics--to be a landowner (and thus to be eligible to both vote and run for office), one was going to be white and male. Most likely, you were also going to be British, so you can't use a last name to help narrow down your choice. When voting rights were extended to other groups (first black males, then women, etc), the political elite were still, by and large, constrained to the same homogenous set of faces (male and white). So, even though you had other groups voting, they were still little able to use descriptive voting to make their choices. So, the heuristic remained party label, or actual party platform.

6) In Africa, upon decolonization and in those nations that chose democracy, you have candidates for all ethnic groups and voters from all groups. Without pre-existing parties to absorb a mix of different groups or to provide an information shortcut to individuals, ethnicity becomes a quick and ready heuristic at the voting booth. Elites (candidates and politicians) then begin to form their platforms on this basis (feedback effect).

So, my dissertation will be this (the above stuffs) and also experiments run in Africa (most likely, though comparison experiments in Latin America or the Middle East may be appropriate, as well). Specifically, I hope to examine the effect of low information or high information on ethnic voting, as well as the effect of ethnic voting (if you're Yoruba and vote Yoruba in Nigeria, do you get more stuff if your guy wins? What if your ethnic group has no chance of procuring a majority? Do you 'absorb' into another group forming a tacit coalition government?)

So, yeah...Jazzed as hell.

I'M GOING TO GET TO TRAVEL AND STUDY SOMETHING INTERESTING! DOES IT GET ANY BETTER????