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, Managing the Predatory State (under review), examines a major dilemma in authoritarian governance: balancing political elites’ demands for rents against a growing grassroots pressure to reduce corruption. Drawing from over 16 months of fieldwork in three regions of 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.
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, Managing the Predatory State (under review), examines a major dilemma in authoritarian governance: balancing political elites’ demands for rents against a growing grassroots pressure to reduce corruption. Drawing from over 16 months of fieldwork in three regions of 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.
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.
