The Course
The Course
Episode 140 - Scott Gehlbach: "I got it. I know what I'm doing."
Professor Scott Gehlbach from the Department of Political Science and Harris School of Public Policy would almost have gone back to his family farm business had it not been for his love for city life and the various life-changing experiences. After spending extensive time in Eastern Europe, he found his research niche and continues to quench his curiosity through conversations with scholars at the University of Chicago. Tune in to this episode to hear his winding road toward academia.
Stephen 00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Scott Gelbach of the Department of Political Science and Harris School of Public Policy. Professor Gelbach is a scholar of authoritarian and post authoritarian regimes, and he's the author of the widely used textbook, Formal Models in Domestic Politics.
He's here today to tell us about his winding road toward academia, which included extensive time in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, his recent work on how autocrats stay in power, and how he became a University of Chicago professor.
Professor Gelbach, welcome to The Course. Thank you so much for joining me this morning. How are you?
Scott Gelbach 00:36
Thanks so much. Nice to be here. Please call me Scott.
Stephen 00:39
Thank you. Will do. Before we get into anything too detailed, Scott, could you just please tell us what your position or positions are at UChicago and a little bit in layman's terms of like what that really means and kind of what your field is about?
Scott Gelbach 00:54
Okay, so I'm the Elise and Jack Lipsey Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Harris School of Public Policy and the College at the University. What this means in practice is that I divide my time between the political science department and the Harris School of Public Policy. In addition to an obvious an outstanding group of political scientists in the Department of Political Science, we have an outstanding group of political scientists and economists working on politics in the Harris School. And it's nice to have one leg in each of those two worlds.
Stephen 01:32
Very cool. Thank you. Yes, I look forward to hearing a little bit more about that. But yeah, you know, we usually proceed kind of chronologically, and go all the way back at the beginning to when you were a kid or maybe like, you know, in high school, what did you imagine yourself doing? Were there signs that you were going to end up doing anything like this?
Scott Gelbach 01:53
Okay, so what I imagined myself doing was going home and running the family farm after college. So I grew up downstate in Lincoln, Illinois. It's the exact center of the state. It's the only town named for Abraham Lincoln before he was elected president. He was a railroad lawyer and he drew up the deed for the town and somehow managed to name the town after himself. This was 1853. And I grew up in a large livestock farm, we raised hogs, we produced, raised about 13, 000, 14, 000 pigs a year. So big farm by the standards of the time. And it had been in the family for several generations. I would have been the fifth generation to go back and run the family farm.
And I was the brother who decided that he was going to go home and run the family farm. My brother went to medical school and actually until pretty late, that was the plan. So my undergraduate degree was in agricultural economics and then immediately after my undergraduate degree at Illinois, I went to business school at Michigan and got an MBA.
And this is all still my way of thinking about the background that might be useful to go home and run this family business. And then I didn't do it.
Stephen 03:13
So, why not?
Scott Gelbach 03:14
Why not? So I guess in the back of my head, I probably understood at some level that this is not what I wanted to do. Maybe skipping ahead a little bit at some point I discovered that I had been miscast as a country person, that I actually enjoyed cities. So that was a piece of it as well.
But, none of this was obviously, you know, apparent to me when I was 23, 24 years old. What I knew at that point was that I wasn't quite ready to go home and run the family farm. And so, I started looking for other opportunities and I found one actually through a friend of mine in business school.
His wife was then working for the member of Congress for my home district in Illinois, and this member of Congress had recently been elected. He was just starting his second term, as I recall, and was on the House Agriculture Committee and was looking for somebody to do his Agriculture Committee work in D.C. And so this friend of mine, she knew of my background and my interest in politics. I guess that must have been apparent from a lot of conversations that we had had over the previous two years. And she recommended that I reach out to the office about potentially, working in that capacity on Capitol Hill.
And so, I did that, I moved to D. C. I began work for this member of Congress and would have been the spring of early winter, early spring, late winter of 1992. And I did that for two and a half years. I really enjoyed working on the Hill. I lived in the district and I think it was at this point that I discovered that I was actually a city person and I enjoyed living in cities.
And at some point, I think I realized that I was not going home and running the family farm, and that was a conversation I had with my parents at that point. And I think it's probably like, you know, it's like kids who come out, it's like, you know, they think it's going to be the big reveal to their parents and in fact, you know, their parents understand their kids extraordinarily well and, you know, the same thing. For me, when we had this conversation about not going home to run the family farm, I think it had been apparent to my parents for a few years, at least, that was going to be the case.
But I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next and the one thing I guess that I did discover at some point was that I wasn't staying on Capitol Hill, so I was working, by way of background, I grew up in this, this sort of bastion of traditional, moderate, midwestern republicanism. My part of Illinois had been or has been represented over the years by people like Ed Madigan and Bob Michael and Ray LaHood. And I was working for a Republican member of Congress in DC, during what became the Gingrich Revolution, and the party was moving one direction, and I found myself moving the other, and at some point it was just a mismatch, and so I knew that staying on Capitol Hill or staying in politics is probably not what I wanted to do, but I wasn't sure what plan B or plan C was.
And an experience that, that I think probably was instrumental in leading me the direction that I ultimately did go was a family vacation in 1987. My parents took my brother and me along on what was for them their 25th wedding anniversary trip. We took a tour of Scandinavia and one, it was a package tour, but one interesting aspect of this package tour was that there was a side trip to the Soviet Union. So we took a train from Helsinki to Leningrad. We spent two days in Leningrad. We flew from Leningrad to Moscow. We spent two days in Moscow. It was just four days in this country, but it was four days during the early Gorbachev era.
It was an incredibly impressionable experience for me. And I think it sparked an interest in that part of the world. That then lay dormant for a number of years until what had been early 1994, I was working in this office in DC. Tom Ewing was the member of Congress, for whom I was working and we had a constituent come to our office one day, who was on the hill selling a program that he had just taken part in. That program was a farmer-to-farmer exchange and he had gone to Ukraine and spent some time in Ukraine during the early post-communist period. So, the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991.
Ukraine is an independent country. Ukraine, like other countries in the region, is going through this profound economic and political transition, and he got to see that up close and I spoke with him and he was excited about his experience. I was excited about his experience and I remembered this interest in the region that dated from this trip in 1987. And it was maybe the only moment in my life when I just feel like there's been this epiphany, this sudden moment of clarity. I walked out of this meeting and I grabbed one of my friends in the office and I said, I got it. I know what I'm doing. I'm moving to Eastern Europe.
Easier said than done, right? So it took a little while.
Stephen 09:02
Hahaha, what was the reaction to that?
Scott 09:03
Yes. Okay. Yeah, so it took me, it took me a few months to figure out how to do that. But I,
Stephen 09:14
Did you know what you wanted to do there? Or did you just…
Scott Gelbach 09:15
I didn't know. I didn't know. I knew that I had a potentially marketable skill in the MBA. I had some friends in DC who had friends in Prague and Budapest. And I bought a backpack or I guess I dug up the backpack that I had used when I was backpacking across Europe after college. And I bought a plane ticket to Prague with a return flight home from Budapest.
And I spent about a week in Prague and Krakow from Budapest seeing the cities but also talking to people about what sort of job opportunities might be available for somebody with my background and interests. And this is the 90s, there was a big expatriate community in these cities at the time.
I think I decided that I wanted to live in Eastern Europe rather than the former Soviet Union, just because my sort of vague understanding at the time was that if you wanted to work in business in the former Soviet Union, you were probably more likely to be working with unsavoury types than was the case in Eastern Europe.
At any rate, I spoke with a lot of people on this trip. I didn't immediately find a job, but shortly after I got home, through a friend of mine, I found a job working in the Prague office of a DC based nonprofit that worked with entrepreneurs in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So this is shortly after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, 1993. Working with them to help them develop business plans and get credit from banks.
And I moved to Prague then in the summer of 1994 and spent three glorious and life changing years in Eastern Europe. Two years in Prague and one year in Budapest.
Stephen 11:13
Wow. That's really cool. this might be one of the most roundabout ways that I've heard of actually becoming an academic, over the course of the show. But I see now, I mean I know that your early research focused right on that period in that region and the changes that those countries were going through?
Scott Gelbach 11:32
Yeah. And so the personal transition for me to academia and to studying the political economic transition in Eastern Europe happened after a year or so of living in Prague. So I spent this year working with check entrepreneurs and that was great. It was really an educational experience in a lot of ways for me.
We lost our foundation funding at some point, so our non-profit was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Mott Foundation and maybe a couple of other sources. At any rate, at some point the Foundation funding ran out. And my time at this organization was coming to an end and I wasn't ready to move back to the States.
I wasn't sure still what I wanted to do next. I think at this point, though, I was starting to think about Ph.D. study. I wasn't sure in what maybe political science, maybe economics. I think even sociology was briefly on my radar. And through another friend, this is maybe just like the through line of all these experiences is people I met through friends in one walk of life or another, but through a friend I met an economist, his name is John Earl, at who then had an appointment at the Central European University, which is a university started by George Soros in the 1990s.
CEU in its original incarnation had campuses in Prague and Warsaw and Budapest. John is an economist. He was with the economics department in Prague, but the whole Prague campus was on the verge of getting up and moving to Budapest. And so I met John, told him more or less what I've just told you about my background and my interests and potentially going to graduate school at some point. And he said, well, you know, I'm moving to Budapest pretty soon, but let's see, try to do things in order. I guess he didn't immediately ask if I wanted to stay behind in Prague and run an enterprise survey for him. So that is what I ended up doing. I think I spent my first few weeks working for him just cleaning data.
He said, I can't afford to pay you full time, but I could pay you half time. I said, that sounds great and so he paid me for 20 hours a week and I worked 70. After a weeks, he’s said, actually, let me take you on full time. I think he was just trying me out.
And so I did that for a couple of months out of the CEO campus at the Hotel Olshanka in Prague, and then the economics department moved to Budapest and I stayed behind in Prague and spent a year working out of the Czech Institute of Sociology, helping John to run an enterprise survey. A survey of recently privatized enterprises on various aspects of their corporate performance.
That was John's work at the time. It's become part of my work over the years is the effects of economic reforms like privatization. It's one of the key economic reforms of the 1990s. Everything was, you know, everything was owned by the state, under communism, not just the, the national giants like the steel manufacturers, but the corner grocery store, or the local shoe store or whatever. And all of this was being privatized during the 1990s. And there were, in our still questions about how effective this was and improving from productivity. And so interviewing CEOs, for managers was an early part of trying to understand those effects.
So I did that for a year. Then I moved to Budapest and worked out of the CEU campus at Budapest for a year, and that was just the most amazing year. John had been invited to advise the government of Mongolia on enterprise privatization. I went to Mongolia with him twice. We worked with the office of the Economic advisor to the Prime Minister. We met the Prime Minister, sat in a meeting with the Prime Minister discussing. the plans for enterprise privatization that we had developed and at CEU in Budapest. I was working alongside this team of graduate students and young scholars who were from all over the post-communist region. So every day at lunch was just like an excursion around Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It was really fantastic.
And then at this time I was applying to graduate programs. I was most interested in politics and I wanted to study political science and so I applied to PhD programs in political science. I, then, the summer of 1997 moved to Berkeley, California to begin my PhD study there and I did that, but I think I never lost my love for the tools of economics that I had developed while working for an economist and I took a lot of coursework in economics as well and at some point realized that I could get a PhD in both political science and economics and so that's what I ultimately ended up doing.
And my work over the years is, has sort of straddled the line between the two disciplines, which is one of the reasons that I enjoy being part of this great group of scholars of political economy at Chicago because we have a lot of folks around here who straddle that line.
Stephen 17:27
Well, and you were a part of the successful push to create a PhD in political economy at UChicago, right?
Scott Gelbach 17:35
Yeah, we have this amazing group of people who do this sort of work. And I guess at this point, it would be useful to define political economy.
Stephen 17:44
Yes, thank you.
Scott Gelbach 17:47
So, yes, you know, you talk to different people on your show, you'll probably get different definitions of the term. So I should just say that for our purposes, what we mean by political economy is the use of tools like game theory and empirical methods for causal inference to study political institutions and behavior.
So it sort of shorthand that's not quite correct, but maybe nonetheless useful is the use of the tools of economics to study politics. And we have an amazing group at Chicago. I think in terms of quantity, certainly the largest group in the world and quantity times quality is just, I mean, it's an incredible place to be.
But this group spans two units on campus. We have folks doing this sort of work in the political science department, and then we have this outstanding group as well in the Harris School. And what we did not historically have was a mechanism to train graduate students in the field. We had a PhD program at the Harris School that trained people who did this sort of work, but also people interested in energy economics or health economics and so forth.
And there wasn't an obvious tie to the political scientists on the other side of the midway in the department. And then in the same way in the Department of Political Science. There's obviously a PhD program, but that's a PhD program that trains people in everything from political economy to political thought and a lot of other things in between.
And so the idea in creating this new PhD program in political economy was to tie these two units together in pursuit of graduate training in political economy. And there's only a few places like this around the country that do anything close to this but it seemed to us a real benefit in being able to teach political economy in this way.
So I think that most people, here who do this sort of work. Most faculty here who do this sort of work did approximately what I did in graduate school, which was to study political science, but then walk over to the economics department and take a lot of courses in economics as well. And that's fine. You can learn the tools of the field that way.
But you also spend a lot of time studying price theory and so forth, things that are not so directly relevant to the academic life of most people who study political economy. It's a second best solution we would say. And the, you know, the first best is to actually learn these tools in the context of studying politics.
And so that's the idea of the program is we give students training akin in rigor to a PhD program in economics, but with a focus on politics, we spend more time on game theory in the first year and essentially no time on price theory. We studied models of politics applications to politics rather than applications to the economy. It's a small, highly selected program, but we have an outstanding team. group of students already in the program. And it's going gangbusters. It's really great.
Stephen 21:13
Glad to hear that. I'm going to skip the question that I often ask, which is have you traveled much for your work and how has that impacted it?
Scott Gelbach 21:21
I added it up at one point, I think I've spent roughly eight years of my adult life living overseas.
Stephen 21:27
Yeah, I think we have covered that.
Scott Gelbach 21:30
It is one of the nice things about the business, I should say. So if you, even if your work is not directly connected to things that are happening overseas, there isn't a lot of opportunity to travel in this profession, so.
Stephen 21:50
Well, and yeah, you know, I did with the time that we have left I did want to ask about the connections between things that are happening in our world currently and your more recent research and I mean I'm interested, if I understand correctly a lot of your recent work has focused on autocracies and I'm curious what tools are you using like what tools and methods do you use to do that kind of research? And yeah, I mean like what research along those lines has been really interesting or important to you of late?
Scott Gelbach 22:24
So I think I would identify myself as a Russia scholar, is one of the hats that I put on. I would not characterize myself as a Ukraine scholar, though I have written a few papers on Ukraine, including a piece that was recently published on Ukrainian oligarchs that I think has relevance for the sort of reforms that, Ukraine will need to undertake at some point if it's to have a stable and well functioning democracy once this war is over.
So my work uses both the tools of game theory and empirical methods for causal inference depending on the paper. And so some of my work on autocracy quite explicitly uses game theory to try to understand the institutions of authoritarian regimes So, you know, most of the human population in through most of human history has lived under non democratic regimes and yet I think we probably know a lot more about democratic regimes than we do about non democratic regimes.
It's just been more the focus of modern political science but that's beginning to change and there's a lot of work in both political science and economics, at the moment, trying to understand the things that autocrats do to avoid coups or revolutions to avoid being overthrown by elite actors or by the general public, to try to govern in a way that is consistent with that desire for survival.
And it's interesting and valuable to try to understand these tactics using the language of game theory, which we can define as a language, a mathematical language to study strategic behavior of actors who are interacting in some sort of strategic environment where the outcome depends on not just what you do, but also on what I do. And we understand that interdependence and take it into account.
And so I've used these tools to study things like media control, censorship and propaganda, the use of semi competitive elections, try to convey an image of popularity to the general population or to elites who might be looking the use of the role of institutionalized ruling parties in autocratic governance. So that's been part of my work is using these tools to try to model these institutions of autocracy.
I've also spent a fair amount of time in recent years studying a particular autocratic regime that no longer exists, which is imperial, well let's say pre-revolutionary, imperial Russia, Czarist Russia. This is an interest that I acquired more or less by accident, one day in the library looking for something else entirely, but stumbling across this multi volume chronicle of the peasant movement in 19th century Russia and understanding that this is an incredible data source and there must be something that could be done with those data.
So most of this work is focused on the period, the 1860s when Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs and instituted a host of other reforms. And that's been a lot of fun because it turns out that there's a lot of interest among other political scientists and economists and also historians in studying Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. And I've gotten to know a lot of those people. I actually run an annual workshop in, we call it the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Eurasia. So it's, we bring together economists and political scientists and historians in roughly equal measure who work on either Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union.
And so that sort of work, there's a little bit of modeling there, but it tends to be more empirical in focus, and one thing that's interesting about that empirical work is that we're relying to some extent on archival work, or at least sort of one degree removed from the archival work that Soviet historians did, who then bequeathed us with various sorts of data.
Stephen 27:12
That's really interesting. And it's also, I mean, it's interesting the time span that you are able to cover basically in this field.
Scott Gelbach 27:22
Yeah, it's I, don't recommend it. necessarily. Moving back 150, 170 years in time. I think when I started doing this work, I assumed that because I knew Russia and I spoke Russian, that it would be an easy transition to studying Imperial Russia. In fact, it's a completely different country and there was a lot to learn. Still is.
Stephen 27:44
There are a lot of threads in this that I would really love to tease out more, we are coming up on time here. So I just have to ask a very general question to wrap up, which is, if you had to pick something, what would you say you find most fulfilling about your work at UChicago?
Scott Gelbach 28:01
I think what I find most fulfilling about my work at the University of Chicago in particular is being embedded in this amazing group of scholars who think about politics in ways similar to the way that I think about politics, use a similar set of tools. And the lunchtime conversations, the weekly seminars. It's part of why I moved here, and it's been, it's lived up to expectations.
Stephen 28:35
Thank you, Professor Gelbach, for your time today. And course takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.