Courses recently taught:
Introduction to Comparative Politics,
Politics of Development,
International Relations,
Democracy and the Rule of Law,
Introduction to Research Methods
Areas of academic interest:
Prof. Jorgensen's research focuses on several
interlinked themes and processes: judicial politics
and rule of law issues more generally (with
particular reference to the so-called “developing
world”); human rights violations and protection; the
role of NGOs within civil society; and the
relationship of the above issues to democratization
and de-democratization. His initial research
project, which culminated in his doctoral
dissertation (2006), examined the linkages between
social cleavages (particularly ethnicity), state
intervention in resource allocation, political
instability and judicial independence. Prof.
Jorgensen sought through both cases study analysis
and large-N empirical testing to demonstrate a
plausible causal pathway from social cleavages to
rent-seeking to political instability stemming from
said rent-seeking to incentives for political actors
to constrain the independence or autonomy of the
courts. A shorter manuscript based on this early
work but incorporating more current data is in
preparation.
Biography:
Prof. Jorgensen's research on NGO’s is part of
project funded by a Kurt E. Olson’s Fellowship
received in 2008. This research looks at the
relationship between NGO lobbying and contact
strategies and how those strategies are affected by
the stability of the larger political and
institutional context. Another component of this
research has been the preparation of a data set of
more than 500 registered NGOs and their
organizational linkages in order to study the
effects of those linkages on NGO coordination and
service delivery.
There are two other longer-term projects related
to human rights violations and protection by state
actors. One is based on a time-series data set
that incorporates human rights data from the
Cingranelli-Richards data set (CIRI) as well as data
on economic, social, and political globalization
from the Swiss organization KOF. Since the
relationship between globalization and state
protection of human rights is a hotly contested one
both in the policy arena as well as in the academic
literature, this data will serve as part of a
research project testing the interaction between
globalization, distribution, and human rights. One
line of argument in the literature has argued that
globalization broadens the range of employment
choices for citizens which in turn reduces the
degree of coercion governments may exert (since
citizens’ dependence upon governments as a supplier
of goods and services is reduced, ceteris
paribus); a counterargument states that
globalization not only weakens social protections
offered by the state but also increases the
incentives for states to suppress local claims by
citizens in favor of those advanced by foreign
investors. The temporal and geographic breadth of
the data collected to date will permit more
extensive empirical testing of these and related
claims. The other project is a large-N test of the
so-called “Kirkpatrick hypothesis” advanced by
former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who argued
that non-communist authoritarian governments were
preferable to “totalitarian” Soviet-style
single-party regimes in terms of both repressiveness
as well as amenability to reform
Curriculum Vitae
