In 2010, I received my Ph.D. in Political Science at UCLA and then joined the faculty at Texas A&M University. From 2008-2009, I was a Fulbright Scholar in Malawi conducting dissertation research on the political economy of HIV/AIDS interventions. I study a variety of topics including African politics, HIV/AIDS, and research methods. In particular, I have been intrigued with the importance of village headmen in rural Africa. Methodologically, I am interested in the systematic analysis of qualitative data, field experiments, social network analysis, and anything that can be learned from longitudinal household-level data.
The Political Economy of HIV/AIDS Intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa
This study examines the local realities of the global intervention against AIDS in Africa. On a continent where 68% of the 33 million people infected with HIV in the world live, and where only 43% of AIDS patients in desperate need of treatment have access to it, what facilitates the gross failures of HIV/AIDS interventions in Africa? When a mobilized international community spends billions of dollars to intervene against a disease, what impedes its efforts to reach intended beneficiaries? With globalization, disease spreads easily across national boundaries, requiring state actors concerned with public health to engage public health problems beyond their own borders, usually delegating responsibilities to far-away agents. Such endeavors require coordination of multiple actors, not just across borders, but also across levels of governance within the target country, creating multiple principal-agent problems in the pursuit of providing for public health. I use a political economy approach that emphasizes the multiplicity of actors involved in a global intervention against disease to bring attention to the incentives and motivations of actors across levels of governance. I focus in particular on the agents implementing interventions. I provide evidence that a major component of the failure of HIV/AIDS programs in Africa is the disconnect in the preferences of providers and receivers. I argue that HIV/AIDS interventions usually fail because local agents actually implementing interventions on the ground act in ways congruent with both their policy preferences and the policy preferences of local citizens. I analyze original data to demonstrate ordinary Africans give relatively low priority to HIV/AIDS interventions, even in the world's highest prevalence countries.
The Role of Executive Time Horizons in State Response to AIDS in Africa, Comparative Political Studies
Abstract: In this paper I argue that politicians' time horizons affect the differing levels of state intervention against AIDS. Using data measuring government spending, AIDS policy, and political constraints, I test the presumption that the leader of a country can determine a country's level of AIDS intervention. I look at countries in east and southern Africa to explore the relationship between political institutions that constrain an executive's time horizon (i.e. competitive elections) and the level of the state's efforts in the fight against AIDS. My primary hypothesis is that an executive with a shorter time horizon is less likely to create policy or devote resources to intervene against AIDS. I find that lengthening an executive's time horizon increases the level of government spending on health, but that executives with shorter time horizons tended to have more comprehensive AIDS policy than their counterparts with longer time horizons.
Access the re-print (previous ungated version here).
Download zipped folder of replication files and analyses not shown.
AIDS Exceptionalism: The View From Below (with Patrick Gerland and Susan Watkins), PDF
The AIDS epidemic has stimulated an outpouring of foreign aid intended to help governments and
individuals in sub-Saharan Africa respond to the epidemic. AIDS has been treated as "exceptional," a
crisis of such magnitude that it should be prioritized over other health and development problems. Whereas scholars and practitioners debate AIDS exceptionalism in international corridors of power,
little is known about local demand for AIDS services in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS has reached
pandemic proportions. This study combines analyses of cross-national public opinion data with survey
and qualitative data from rural Malawi to assess the relative demand for AIDS services compared to
other health and development needs. Our findings suggest weak demand for AIDS resources in the parts of Africa hardest hit by AIDS. Although the data from rural Malawi show that rural residents are fully aware of the risk of dying from AIDS, other problems are perceived as more pervasive and urgent.
An Offer You Can't Refuse? Provider-Initiated HIV Testing in Antenatal Clinics in Rural Malawi (with Nicole Angotti and Lauren Gaydosh), forthcoming at Health Policy and Planning. Access the pre-print or a previous, ungated version: CCPR Working Paper #033-08.
International organizations promote provider-initiated, "routine" HIV testing of pregnant women seeking antenatal care as an effort to curb mother-to-child transmission. We offer an account of the perceptions of HIV testing at antenatal clinics in rural Malawi. Although it is both international and Government of Malawi policy that women must be explicitly informed of their right to refuse testing, analysis of in-depth interviews paired with evidence from a collection of observational field journals show that rural Malawians do not perceive HIV testing as a choice, but rather as compulsory to receive antenatal care. This study illustrates dissonance between global expectations and local realities of the delivery of HIV testing interventions.
The Different Movers in a Social Movement: Survey data from the May 1 immigration rallies in Los Angeles (with Michael Suk-Young Chwe, Darin DeWitt, and Michael Stone)
This paper studies participation in social movements using original survey data collected during the May 1 immigration reform rallies in Los Angeles, California in 2006. More than 500,000 people participated in the May 1 rallies in Los Angeles as part of a nationwide movement supporting immigration reform following the passage of HR 4437 in the United States House of Representatives. Our paper describes the population that participated in this recent social movement. Using the survey responses of 876 demonstration participants at three different demonstration locations, we predict first-time protest participation, demonstrating the characteristic differences between first-time and repeat protesters. The data reveal a few substantial findings. First, we find that even when there is substantial pre-protest debate on future outcomes dependent on the type of demonstration, events organized by different groups with different motivations can have participants that are quite similar to each other; in parallel to this finding, even events organized by the same group with the same motivation can have participants that are quite different from each other. Second, first-time protesters were more likely to respond to the survey in Spanish than repeat protesters. Finally, affinity with the protest message was the strongest predictor of participation in the May 1 marches, stronger than even costs of participating in a protest. Our findings point to a new mobilization of Spanish-speakers in the debate over immigration policy.
Fax: 979.845.2511
Email: kim@polisci.tamu.edu
Updated: March 2011