Visitors to the Chair

Andrew Dawson is a Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with both the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance and the Centre for International Studies at the Université de Montréal, holding both FQRSC and CÉRIUM Postdoctoral Fellowships.  He completed his doctoral research in the Department of Sociology at McGill University in 2011.  His primary areas of research expertise are political sociology, international development, ethnic and political violence, and comparative historical research.  The common thread that ties these areas together is an overarching interest in the factors that influence development in the Global South.  Specifically, he has pursued a cross-national research program that uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the causes and the consequences of the rule of law and the determinants of ethnic and political violence.

His dissertation research investigates the determinants of the rule of law in lower-income post-colonial societies by comparing Jamaica and Barbados, two countries with many important similarities, but with divergent outcomes concerning the rule of law.  His overall findings identify ethnic diversity, political culture and state legitimacy as factors that help explain the divergent trajectories of the rule of law in Jamaica and Barbados.

While at the Université de Montréal, Andrew will build on his dissertation research towards a broader analysis of the determinants of the rule of law in the Global South.  This will be done through conducting a historical case study of the rule of law in Haiti – a country with one of the lowest levels of the rule of law in the Americas – and a cross-national statistical analysis on the impact of political culture on the rule of law.

See curriculum vitae.

Recent publications:

• Dawson, Andrew (2010).  “State Capacity and the Political Economy of Child Mortality in Developing Countries Revisited: From Fiscal Sociology towards the Rule of Law.”  International Journal of Comparative Sociology 51 (6): 403-422.
• Lange, Matthew and Andrew Dawson (2010).  “Education and Ethnic Violence: A Cross-National Time-Series Analysis.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 16 (2): 216-239.
• Lange, Matthew and Andrew Dawson (2009).  “Dividing and Ruling the World? A Statistical Test of the Effects of Colonialism on Postcolonial Civil Violence” Social Forces 88 (2): 785-817.