You are here :: Home » Research Initiatives » Seed Grants » State-Building and Transformations in Elite Recruitment

Research Seed Grant | 2001-2002

Climbing the Sky: State-Building and Transformations in Elite Recruitment

by William McAllister (ISERP)

This project will develop a proposal for a study of the relationship between elite recruitment and state-building in the United States. The grant will fund a study that will join a novel analytic technique (optimal sequencing/optimal matching) to unique time-weighted data of individual elite careers to analyze temporal change in the relationship between elite recruitment and American state formation. this small research project will establish two conditions for generating a proposal for external funding: resolving technical/substantive issues associated with applying this method to me data and demonstrating the utility of combining this method with these data to create theoretically and substantively interesting results. This grant is an initial step in a larger intellectual project that centers around research on the mechanisms, timing, pacing and nature of temporal transformations in American state-building, particularly its elite recruitment structure. Elite recruitment is little studied; its relationship to American state-building not at all. The seed grant will establish the utility of using optimal sequencing to analyze changes in careers relative to hypotheses concerning typical dimensions of state formation, including: permeability, loyalty, nationalization, and administrative bureaucratic capacity.