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Dr Jeremy Bowles
Biography
I work on the political economy of development, mostly focused on sub-Saharan Africa. My work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science and the American Political Science Review, and has been supported by organisations including IGC, J-PAL, Stanford Impact Labs, and USAID. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2021 and was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University. Prior to graduate school I received B.A. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Oxford.
Research
My work considers longstanding challenges in the political economy of development, both historical and contemporary, with a primary regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. My core research agenda studies the interaction of state-building processes with distributive politics. I study how distributive conflicts constrain how states develop; and, in turn, how variation in states’ capacities shape the distribution of welfare outcomes between societal groups. My secondary agenda considers the dynamics of electoral accountability where institutionalised party competition is weak.
Publications
- Journal articles
- Bowles, Jeremy. Forthcoming. “Identifying the Rich: Registration, Taxation, and Access to the State in Tanzania.” American Political Science Review.
2020
- Bowles, Jeremy, Horacio Larreguy, and Shelley Liu. 2020. “How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia.” American Journal of Political Science 64(4): 952-967.
Teaching
At UCL I teach two undergraduate modules: “Contemporary Politics and Governance in Africa” (POLS0087) and “Models and Evidence in Political Economy” (POLS0104).