ERIC D. RAILE

Email: raileeri@msu.edu
Webpage: http://www.msu.edu/~raileeri/
Subfields: Comparative politics, international relations, public policy, methodology
Dissertation topic: Subjective insecurity and attitudes toward the phenomena of globalization, corruption, and terrorism in comparative context
Expected Dissertation Defense: April 2008
Committee: Brian D. Silver (Chair), Eric C. C. Chang, Michael Colaresi, Aaron McCright (Sociology)

Eric takes an interdisciplinary approach to political science that reflects a strong liberal arts background as an undergraduate and broad coursework as a graduate student.  His research and teaching interests span the traditional subfields of comparative politics, international relations, public policy, and methodology.  As a student of comparative politics, he is a general comparativist with interest in the developing world and in Latin America more specifically.  Prior to entering graduate school, Eric spent three years working in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government; he continues to do occasional work on public ethics and anticorruption programs for the federal government.  He received a master’s degree in political science from Michigan State University in 2005 and a bachelor’s degree in political science and Spanish from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, in 2000.  Though short summaries follow immediately below, please see Eric’s webpage for further information about his research and teaching activities.

Eric has taught courses on comparative politics, public policy analysis, and field experience and has served as a teaching assistant with recitation sections for courses on American national government, political science theory, political science methodology, and comparative politics.  The Department of Political Science has given him the title of senior teaching assistant and has nominated him for the University’s Excellence-in-Teaching Citation.

Eric currently has two major research agendas.  His dissertation develops a subjective security approach that bridges concerns from comparative politics, international relations, and public policy.  He subsequently uses econometric tests to gauge the usefulness of this approach in the areas of individual attitudes toward globalization, corruption, and terrorism.  This agenda likely will address topics such as democratization, religion, and ethnic conflict as it expands.  Another major research agenda examines governance issues in multiparty presidential regimes – the modal regime type in Latin America.  Current projects in this agenda address the mechanics of executive-legislative trades in Brazil, the institutional sources of the recent mensalão corruption scandal in Brazil, and the sources of variation in legislative support across multiparty presidential regimes.  Beyond these two major agendas, Eric is involved in research regarding the concept of political will, the implementation of public ethics programs, and orientations toward communication in organizations.  Planned projects in the longer term concern budgetary politics in both the US and comparative contexts and a re-examination of the relative strengths of executive and legislative branches.