Dylan Potts

I am a political science PhD candidate at the European University Institute (EUI).  I am broadly interested in political economy and I use quantitative methods to analyse large-scale archival sources. Throughout my research, I fuse theoretical insights from political behaviour with new datasets to understand the behaviour of individuals in high-stakes situations. 

 

My PhD research is focused on understanding what causes individuals' behaviour across several different forms of conflict; civil wars, inter-state war, and insurgencies. Within political violence, my main focus is on cases of mass mobilisation. A central tenet of my research is what factors influence soldiers' behaviour when these troops are 'ordinary' people. States need to motivate millions of inexperienced soldiers to join the armed forces when a state is threatened. These newly minted citizen-soldiers must cooperate with one another, remain on the battlefield, and be prepared to pay the ultimate price. How this process unfolds in democracies, when coercive tools are limited, is the overarching problem I study. 

 

I analyse the drivers of soldiers' decision-making in the US Civil War, World War 2, and the Irish War of Independence. I develop and leverage large archival datasets which contain soldiers' records. I then use quasi-experimental approaches to understand volunteering, attacks on civilians, and desertion during these wars. I study different behaviours within each war. For instance, I ask how pre-war experiences of famine changed Irish migrant troops' propensity to desert during the American Civil War; I also analyse whether conscription encouraged or discouraged men from volunteering for service during World War 2. I combine causal inference approaches with machine learning methods to describe these patterns of behaviour, as well as natural language processing to harness textual sources. 

 

My other research agenda is democratization; I work on understanding how legislators became professionalized over time and how new voters became active in the political process. This agenda requires novel datasets and theoretical development to understand how democracy has developed in the United States and Western Europe. A common thread is that democracy requires several conditions to work in practice. Politicians need to be office-seeking for voters to be able to hold them accountable in elections and for legislators to gain experience to craft high quality legislation. Also, voters added to the electorate require de-facto enfranchisement; de-jure enfranchisement without adequate political resources or representation indicates an incomplete process. These necessary conditions of democracy, and how they emerged over time, informs us about political trajectories after a democratic transition has occurred.