The Politics of Exit: Emigration, Collective Action, and Agrarian Reform in Mexico. Oxford University Press, 2026

Do exit options like emigration reduce pressure on governments, elites, or institutions to undertake difficult political reforms from within? If so, what are the broader consequences for those with and without access to exit options themselves? This manuscript examines how the possibility of exit influences individuals’ willingness and ability to participate in collective action and how this in turn shapes the prospects for political change from within. I argue that the presence of exit options complicates collective action through two mechanisms. First, those who can leave become less willing to invest in uncertain efforts to improve conditions directly through collective action. Second, simply knowing that some people have access to exit options lowers everyone’s confidence that collective action can be successful. Through this expectations channel, even those without access to exit options become more hesitant to participate in collective efforts to effect change from within, and those who do have access to exit options feel more compelled to pursue them.

The primary empirical application is emigration and rural politics in Mexico between 1910 and 2010. For over a century, Mexico has seen periodic phases of high emigration to the United States, but the availability of these exit options has varied greatly across space and time for reasons plausibly unrelated to domestic politics. Using detailed subnational data and a series of related research designs, I show that collective political mobilization and government responsiveness declined when and where emigration became more attractive or available. Drawing on evidence from this and other cases (including El Salvador, Japan, and the former German Democratic Republic), I trace the mechanisms through which ongoing emigration complicated collective action both contemporaneously and over a longer time horizon, illustrating how the possibility of exit made it difficult to sustain pressure for reform, why people increasingly felt compelled to pursue “voluntary” exit options in place of trying to effect change from within, and how governments and elites have used the promise of exit to undermine the threat of opposition or unrest. This work provides a new framework for considering whether exit options are always empowering to those who possess them, how individual exit options influence others, and what precisely is meant by the popular representation of emigration as a “safety valve” for political conflict.

Ungated introduction and table of contents

The Tightrope of Centralization (with Francisco Garfias). Under Contract. Cambridge University Press, Historical Political Economy Series.

This book examines the dynamic relationship between political centralization and domestic conflict. Central authorities in many contexts rely on local elites to maintain order and repress rebellion, but this often comes at a high cost in terms of lost revenue and control. State-building efforts that consolidate authority in the central government are often attractive to central rulers, especially when facing external threat, but they are risky as well. Though they may succeed in bolstering the financial strength of the state, these efforts run the risk of backfiring by alienating crucial intermediaries who maintain order in the periphery. We explore this argument empirically drawing on qualitative evidence from Russia, France, and China and detailed subnational data on state building and conflict across over 500 years of Mexican history.

Fiscal Legibility and State Development (with Francisco Garfias). Under Contract. Cambridge University Press, Elements in Political Economy Series.

This Element examines the dynamic relationship between political centralization and fiscal legibility: the ability of central authorities to independently observe, measure, and assess local populations, wealth, and activities for the purposes of taxation and control. Building on recent work (Garfias and Sellars 2026, AJPS), we develop a dynamic model of political centralization and exogenous (e.g., geography) and endogenous (e.g., census records) fiscal legibility. As our theory highlights, political centralization and investment in improving fiscal legibility tend to be self-reinforcing. In information-poor areas, rulers are often better off relying on more decentralized institutions that do not involve monitoring tax-collecting intermediaries on a day-to-day basis. There is little incentive for rulers to invest in improving informational capacity under these arrangements as they do not require verifying the performance of intermediaries directly. By contrast, in places where fiscal legibility is sufficiently high, political centralization is advantageous for rulers. With improved information rulers can better identify when intermediaries are performing poorly, allowing them to tighten control and retain a greater share of the resources. Centralization in turn encourages additional investment in improving fiscal legibility to make it easier to independently monitor intermediary performance. This positive feedback implies that a small change in exogenous legibility in either direction can have much larger consequences for the trajectory of later state development. 

Using the model as a guide, we examine the evolution of political institutions and state investment over the nearly 300-year history of the Spanish colonial state in central Mexico, from the Spanish Conquest in 1519 through the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1810, using a series of related research designs. We then extend our analysis to qualitatively discuss the evolution of centralization and investment in informational capacity in several comparison cases.

Ungated introduction and table of contents

Untitled Political Economy Textbook (with Anthony Fowler and Stephane Wolton). Book Proposal in development for submission to Wiley Publishing

We are in the early stages of developing a upper-level undergraduate textbook on theory and evidence in political economy. Book proposal expected in December 2027.