Tudor, C. and D. Yashar, “Gender and the Editorial Process: World Politics, 2007-2017,” PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 51 Num. 4 (2018): 870-880. DOI:10.1017/S1049096518000641.
Tudor, C. L. and H. Appel, “Is Eastern Europe to Blame for Falling Corporate Taxes in Europe? The Politics of Tax Competition Following EU Enlargement,” East European Politics & Societies & Cultures, Vol. 30 Num. 4 (2016): 855-884. DOI:10.1177/0888325416663834.
Appel, H. and C. Tudor Block, “The Sovereign Debt Crisis, Bailout Politics, and Fiscal Coordination in the European Union,” in The European Union Beyond the Crisis: Evolving Governance, Contested Policies, and Disenchanted Publics, Ed. Boyka M. Stefanova. Lexington Books, (2015): 107-122.
Tudor, C. L. and C. Vega, “A Review of Textual Analysis in Economics and Finance,” in Communication and Language Analysis in the Corporate World, Ed. Roderick P. Hart. IGI Global, (2014): 122-139.
Dissertation Book Project
Revolutionary Exclusion: How Liberal Institutions Undermined Women's Rights
This project investigates women's political and economic rights across half a millennium in France and Western Europe. I present a cautionary tale of the fragility of rights and sobering origin story of a distinctively modern form of gender inequality and its enduring legacy. I combine qualitative and quantitative analyses to reverse a popular narrative asserting the progressive emancipation of women. In popular rhetoric and the social sciences alike, there is a common assumption that women were universally subordinate and without rights until the late 19th century at which point, they were slowly but progressively liberated. In contrast, I show that the very birth of economic and political liberalism marked a reversal in women's public rights. The French Revolution, the embodiment of democratization and of modern economic rights and freedoms, facilitated the exclusion of women from formal politics, a critical alteration in family property laws, and a shift in the relationship between these political and economic institutions. Using archival and primary sources I demonstrate the surprisingly widespread participation of women in early modern assembly meetings across France and highlight its connection to women’s economic activities. I show how local and national economic relations, including patriarchal lineage--based property relations, facilitated the rights of some women. I then qualitatively trace how revolutionary reforms excluded women from politics and elevated husbands over lineage in family property relations. Attempting to sweep away old hierarchies bolstered by indelible links between property and power, parental authority, and local particularism, liberal reformers undermined women's Old Regime paths to public affairs while at the same time stopping short of enshrining individual men and women as the central social and market actors at the foundation of new political relations. Instead, a top-down agenda promoted nuclear families with authoritarian husbands as the primary building block of society--constraining women's activities in new ways. Finally, I quantitatively and qualitatively show how this new familial-political order stymied women's 20th century suffrage efforts and political participation not only in France but also in Germany and across Europe.
Work in Progress
"The Economic Logic of Women's Political Rights in Pre-Democratic Representative Institutions: The Case of Ecclesiastical Women in Early Modern France." Under Review Political scientists often assume that women had no political rights before the 20th century. Archival records show that this is not the case and reveal that an unlikely source enabled women to participate in politics: the Church. Using novel data for over one hundred assembly meetings between 1493 and 1789, I demonstrate that ecclesiastical women had and exercised political rights across France. Using qualitative analysis, I argue that ecclesiastical women, like their male counterparts, had these rights because religious vocation involved economic activities---including, but not limited to, property ownership. In the eyes of the state and local officials, economic entitlement, not sex, determined access to representative institutions. Ecclesiastical women’s political rights logically followed their other public engagements—as was also the case for some non-clerical women. The findings suggest that in the long trajectory of western political development, it is the universal political exclusion of women, on the basis of sex, that is illogical and puzzling.
"Modernization and Gender Equality: It's Complicated" with Dawn Teele, in Handbook of Political Economy eds. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Invited contribution, Under Review by editors.
Did "modernization," by which we mean Western style economic and political development, lead to an improvement in the lives of women and greater gender equality? Foundational works on gender in political science and economics have often answered yes. In this chapter we outline this intellectual tradition and then argue that the relationship between development and women's equality is more complicated than it appears. Focusing on the evolution of women's inheritance rights and access to property in marriage, we show that laws were highly variable in the medieval period; that in the early modern period countries moved toward primogeniture (especially in land-based economies); and that equal inheritance became common prior to industrialization. We further show that marital property was not linked deterministically to development. Turning to women’s political rights, we show that some women had rights prior to modernization, even losing them in the process of political development. Moreover, political incentives, more than economic pressures, explain universal suffrage. Just as political economists have moved beyond modernization theory in the study of democratization, we push gender scholars toward a more developmental, by which we mean more historical, understanding of the evolution of gender rights.
"Women's Suffrage and the Threat of Redistribution in the Family.'' Working Paper, Revisions in progress.
The distribution of power and resources are paramount in our theoretical understandings of democracy, dictatorship, and men's struggle for suffrage. This paper argues that this is likewise true for women, but the locust of distributional conflict is within the family rather than between families of different classes. From the foundation of democracy, women's suffrage was seen as a threat to the marital authority of men. And indeed, by the 20th century, suffragist often sought political rights in service of or alongside an agenda set on redistributing power and resources in the family. Focusing on the case of France and using a multi-method approach, I provide evidence that the issue of redistribution in the family was central to how proponents and opponents thought about women's suffrage and that variation in actual family distribution—based on marital property arrangements—systematically shaped geographic patterns of women's suffrage activity. The findings suggest that a distribution of power and resources in the family that strongly favors husbands, and the fear of alternative arrangements, helped to establish and prolong women's disenfranchisement.
"The Legacy of Imperial Institutions and Women’s Political Participation.'' Working Paper, Revisions in progress.
This paper probes the historical legacy of imperial civil institutions on women's political participation. The paper provides evidence that the imperial introduction of the French Civil Code -- often celebrated as the progenitor of modern civil liberalism in Europe -- counterintuitively constrained women's mobilization for political rights in Germany and women's political participation across Europe. I argue that the reason for this is the ways in which the French code strongly privileged husbands in marriage. Using novel primary source data collected and geocoded on women's suffrage organizations in Germany in the early 20th century, I exploit a quasi-natural experiment to suggest a potential causal relationship between civil institutions and this spatial measure of suffrage mobilization. The use of the French code is associated with lower suffrage activity in the early 20th century, especially among women who were or had been married. Across Europe, the imperial legacy of widespread adoption of civil codes similar to the French code is likewise associated with lower political participation among women.
"Divided Interests: How Women's Economic Activities Overcome Religious Doctrine.'' Ongoing Research
"The Redistributional Logic of Equal Inheritance," with Tine Paulsen, University of Southern California and University of Zurich. Ongoing Research
Drivers and Consequences of Labor Reform in Early 20th Century France, with Victor Gay, Toulouse School of Economics. Ongoing Research