Margaret Hanson
Assistant Professor
Contact
Margaret Hanson
Assistant Professor
School of Politics & Global Studies
Arizona State University
About
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. As a political economist, my interdisciplinary and multi-methods research examines state-society relations in autocracies. Specifically, through research that straddles the line between international and comparative political economy, I explore how legal institutions, economic development, support for democracy, and migration in response to repression shape state-society relations under dictatorship. Regionally, I specialize in the politics of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
My book, Authoritarian Legality in Globalizing Dictatorships (status - R&R), examines how a major dilemma in authoritarian governance -- balancing political elites’ demands for rents against a growing grassroots pressure to reduce corruption -- shapes citizen-state legal disputes in two Central Asian states. Drawing from over 16 months of fieldwork in Kazakhstan, I find that former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev responded to anti-corruption demands by emphasizing global rule of law norms in government reforms. However, in practice, he turned to law and courts to manage, rather than eliminate, officials’ corrupt behavior; the mismatch between the regime’s rhetoric and actions further eroded its legitimacy and culminated in a national uprising in 2022. In neighboring Uzbekistan, economic liberalization adopted by the country's new president led to similar dynamics and increased citizen-state engagement in the courts. Related work focuses on the measurement of judicial corruption and its applications for policymakers interested in judicial reform.
My current research centers on migration, economic development, and governance in a world characterized by rising authoritarianism and globalized work. In a series of co-authored articles, I examine migration in response to authoritarian repression; one project focuses on Russian migration to Central Asia and the South Caucasus following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while the other investigates political and economic push-pull factors among highly-skilled Iranian migrants. Both tackle questions related to how individuals' conceptualization of and support for democracy shape their decisions related to migration, and this broader topic of individual-level support for democracy constitutes the third major focus of my research.
From 2017-2018, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. I completed my PhD in political science at the Ohio State University in 2017. Before coming to Ohio State, I earned an MA in Eurasian Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg and a BA in History from Grinnell College.
My book, Authoritarian Legality in Globalizing Dictatorships (status - R&R), examines how a major dilemma in authoritarian governance -- balancing political elites’ demands for rents against a growing grassroots pressure to reduce corruption -- shapes citizen-state legal disputes in two Central Asian states. Drawing from over 16 months of fieldwork in Kazakhstan, I find that former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev responded to anti-corruption demands by emphasizing global rule of law norms in government reforms. However, in practice, he turned to law and courts to manage, rather than eliminate, officials’ corrupt behavior; the mismatch between the regime’s rhetoric and actions further eroded its legitimacy and culminated in a national uprising in 2022. In neighboring Uzbekistan, economic liberalization adopted by the country's new president led to similar dynamics and increased citizen-state engagement in the courts. Related work focuses on the measurement of judicial corruption and its applications for policymakers interested in judicial reform.
My current research centers on migration, economic development, and governance in a world characterized by rising authoritarianism and globalized work. In a series of co-authored articles, I examine migration in response to authoritarian repression; one project focuses on Russian migration to Central Asia and the South Caucasus following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while the other investigates political and economic push-pull factors among highly-skilled Iranian migrants. Both tackle questions related to how individuals' conceptualization of and support for democracy shape their decisions related to migration, and this broader topic of individual-level support for democracy constitutes the third major focus of my research.
From 2017-2018, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. I completed my PhD in political science at the Ohio State University in 2017. Before coming to Ohio State, I earned an MA in Eurasian Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg and a BA in History from Grinnell College.
