Tudor, C. L. "The Political Limits of the Patriarchy: Women’s Rights in Early Representative Institutions", Perspectives on Politics. Published online 2025:1-22. doi:10.1017/S1537592725103253.
Tudor, C.L. and D. Teele, "Modernization and Gender Equality? It’s Complicated" in ed. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Handbook of Political Economy, North Holland Press. Forthcoming. An earlier version available on SSRN.
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: Democracy, and Women's Lost Rights
Did modern political development in the West—by which I mean the overlapping processes of state formation, liberal institutional reform, and democratization—make society more equal? This book investigates this classical question through a study of women’s political and economic rights across half a millennium in France and Western Europe. The findings disrupt a popular narrative of the progressive emancipation in which women’s empowerment is seen as monotonically improving with political development. They show instead that early stages of democratization led to declines in women’s rights long before these rights re-emerged in subsequent centuries. Such a revision in our understanding of the trajectory of women’s rights and what it means for political development more broadly is acutely important at a moment when the durability of liberal democratic institutions and equality under them face existential threat. The insights of the book shed light both on the severity of these threats and why they have emerged.
New & Forthcoming
"The Political Limits of the Patriarchy: Women’s Rights in Early Representative Institutions", in Perspectives on Politics.
Political scientists often assume that women had no political rights before the twentieth century. Archival records show that this is not the case and reveal an unlikely group of politically active women: Catholic nuns. Using novel data for more than 150 assembly meetings between 1493 and 1789, I demonstrate that ecclesiastical women exercised political rights systematically across France, despite a patriarchal church and monarchy. Ecclesiastical women had political rights because they were economic actors with a stake in state finances and local affairs. Theoretically, I argue that early representative practices ought to be viewed as a tool used by rulers to increase compliance with governance activities. Accordingly, rulers had an incentive to afford rights of representation to those actors on whose compliance they depended: most often, these were economic actors, including some women. From this perspective, select women’s inclusion should have been the default in many early representative institutions. This logic extends beyond ecclesiastical women in France, turning on its head the taken-for-granted assumption of women’s historical political exclusion.
"Modernization and Gender Equality: It's Complicated" with Dawn Teele, in Handbook of Political Economy eds. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. Invited contribution, forthcoming.
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 historical understanding of the evolution of gender rights.
Other Work in Progress
“The Modern Roots of Women’s Disempowerment.”Working Paper, Revisions in Progress.
“The Redistributional Logic of Inheritance,” with Tine Paulsen, U. of Zurich. Ongoing Research.
“Divided Interests: Women’s Economic Activities and Religious Doctrine.” Ongoing Research.
"Drivers and Consequences of Labor Reform in Early 20th Century France," with Victor Gay, Toulouse School of Economics. Ongoing Research