Rachel Gisselquist

Rachel M. Gisselquist is a PhD candidate in political science, specializing in comparative politics and international relations. She is also a Research Fellow of the International Security Program and the Program on Intrastate Conflict at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She works on ethnic politics and conflict, democracy and democratization, elections and party politics, and the political economy of development in Africa and Latin America. She holds a MPP from Harvard University and a BSFS from Georgetown University, both with a focus on international development.

Her dissertation, “Ethnic Leftists, Populist Ethnics: Elections and the New Politics of Identity in Latin America and Beyond,” measures and explains changes in the relative salience of ethnic and class identities in electoral politics in Third and Fourth Wave democracies. The project develops an explanatory framework highlighting four key processes and, within this framework, a theory of “constrained leadership” that offers testable hypotheses about how social structure influences elite manipulation of identity politics. The dissertation presents new data on cross-national variation in identity politics, building on the “Constructivist Dataset on Ethnicity and Institutions,” a project led by NYU Professor Kanchan Chandra. In addition, it draws extensively on fieldwork in Bolivia, as well as on fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa and on a handful of shadow cases. It is written with a view to the implications of the topic for the quality of democracy across countries, which she will explore more fully in future work.

Some of Rachel’s other recent projects and publications are on peacekeeping, state failure, ethnic divisions and governance, American political culture and Mexican immigration (with MIT Professor Chappell Lawson), democratization and elections in Benin, Bolivian politics, and the Sudanese civil war. She has used a variety of methods in her work and is interested especially in combining large-n and case study methods. She also has done several projects using content analysis, including work on the Constructivist Dataset on Ethnicity and Institutions and research with Professor Lawson on political advertising in the 2006 Mexican elections.

Rachel’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation ( SES-0419737), the National Security Education Program, MIT’s Center for International Studies, the Mellon-MIT Program on NGOs and Forced Migration, and the Carroll L. Wilson Award. She has conducted field research in Benin, Bolivia, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and South Africa and traveled widely.

Selected Working Papers

“Ethnic Leftists, Populist Ethnics: Elections and the New Politics of Identity in Latin America and Beyond,” selected chapters of dissertation manuscript.
“Benin since the 1990s,” book chapter for collaborative project on “Deviant Democracies: Democratization against All Odds,” led by Renske Doorenspleet, Petr Kopecky, and Cas Mudde, September 2006.
“Political Advertising in the 2006 Mexican Presidential Elections” (Rachel Gisselquist and Chappell Lawson), August 2006.
“Benin’s 2006 Presidential Elections,” June 2006.
“Multiethnic Parties,” book chapter for “Measuring Ethnicity,” a co-authored manuscript by Kanchan Chandra, Rachel Gisselquist, Daniel Metz, Adam Ziegfeld, and Christopher Wendt, May 2006.
“Political Values and Acculturation in the Mexican Origin Population in the U.S.” (Chappell Lawson and Rachel Gisselquist), March 2004.
“Ethnic Divisions, Conflict, and the Size of Government – Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly Revisited,” May 2003.

Selected Publications and Professional Papers

“Colombia,” briefing paper on the conflict, politics, and development prepared for the Program on Intrastate Conflict for the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives, September 2006.
“Peacekeeping Forces,” in Governments of the World: A Global Guide to Citizens’ Rights and Responsibilities, ed. C. Neal Tate (MacMillan Reference/Thomson Gale, December 2005), 262-268.
Review of Mestizaje Upside Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia, by Javier Sanjinés C. ( Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004) in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36.2 (Autumn 2005): 308-310.
“Ethnicidad, clase y cambio en el sistema de partidos boliviano,” T’inkazos: Revista Boliviana de Ciencias Sociales 8.18 (May 2005): 53-80.
“Bolivia’s 2004 Municipal Elections,” Focal Point: Spotlight on the Americas (January 2005): 1-2.
“The Sudan: A Successfully Failed State” (with Gérard Prunier), in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Robert I. Rotberg ( Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 101-127.
To Rid the Scourge of War: UN Peace Operations and Today’s Crises (Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation, 2002), WPF Reports 31.

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant for “Research Scope and Methods” (Professor Adam Berinsky), MIT Department of Political Science, fall 2006.
Instructor for “Introduction to African Politics and Society” (developed and taught course for students doing projects in Nigeria and Tanzania as part of the “iLabs-Africa Project”), MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, September 2005 – July 2006.
Teaching Assistant for “Fundamentals of Public Policy” (Professors Andrea Campbell and Judith Layzer), MIT Department of Political Science, fall 2005.
Teaching Assistant for “The Microeconomic Analysis of Poverty and Development” (Professor Robert T. Jensen), Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, spring 1999.