Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop as they host Bogdan Popescu, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at John Cabot University.
"When do historical inequalities persist, and when do they fade? The Habsburg–Ottoman frontier produced literacy gaps of up to 40 percentage points in early twentieth-century Southeast Europe. Yet by 1991, these gaps had nearly vanished in Romania while remaining substantial in Yugoslavia’s successor states. I argue that imperial legacies are conditionally erasable: convergence depends on the interaction between inherited administrative capacity and state–society alignment. Where centralized regimes govern ethnoreligiously aligned populations, they can overcome weak bureaucratic inheritances through mass campaigns. Where they confront status-reversed minorities misaligned with successor states, historical inequalities endure despite similar formal capacity. Using novel boundary discontinuity methods along historically credible segments of the 1739 Habsburg–Ottoman frontier, I demonstrate that Ottoman rule caused substantial literacy disadvantages, particularly among women. Communist schooling campaigns narrowed these gaps, but convergence was far more complete in homogeneous Romania (83% closure in log-odds) than in heterogeneous Yugoslavia (27% closure). Within Yugoslavia, literacy gaps persisted longest in Muslim-majority districts, where imperial status reversal fostered institutional mistrust-even as the negative effects of religious fractionalization attenuated over time. These findings specify scope conditions for institutional persistence and clarify when authoritarian state-building can rewrite historical hierarchies."
Bogdan G. Popescu’s research interests focus on comparative politics and historical political economy using novel data from historical sources. He started teaching at JCU in 2023. His first book, Imperial Borderlands: Institutions and Legacies of the Habsburg Military Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2023), draws on political science, economics, and history to examine key questions related to state formation, extractive institutions, and the modern-day impact of colonial legacies. He argues that the effect of extractive institutions depends on the removal of property rights, the use of violence, and investment in local infrastructure. To illustrate such effects, he focuses on military colonialism in the Habsburg Empire, a state that governed over vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe.
Ariel Sowers
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