Thomas E. Flores is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Michigan and is currently working on his dissertation, entitled The Market and the State: The Politics of Property Rights and Economic Exclusion. This research examines how the design of political institutions underlies cross-national differences in the protection of legal rights to property.

A gathering consensus in the economics and policy communities maintains that the legal protection of private property is the most important institutional guarantor of long-term economic growth. Thomas' dissertation extends this logic by building a political institutional account of the legal protection of property. He argues that in disputes over legal rights, economic actors, focused on private gains, will lobby politicians for rules that systematically favor their property rights while excluding others'. Cross-national variation in the efficiency and inclusiveness of property rights rules is thus the product of the interaction of political leaders and private economic actors, which is in turn the product of political institutions. Thomas adapts extant political theory, particularly the selectorate theory of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his co-authors, to argue regimes that allow broad participation but rely on a small “winning coalition” to actually choose political leaders are likely to engage in more serious economic exclusion.

Thomas uses a two-pronged empirical strategy to evaluate this theoretical account. First, he employs statistical methods to analyze the effects of political institutions on the inclusiveness and quality of property rights protection. Second, Thomas' field research, conducted in 2006 in Bogotá, Colombia, illustrates how political efforts to recognize and protect the land of poor farmers was defeated by rich landowners organizing through political institutions that favored their interests.

As a visiting scholar at the Centennial Center, Thomas is writing and revising three chapters of his dissertation. He also is engaged in collaborative research with Irfan Nooruddin of The Ohio State University on the political economy of economic recovery from devastating civil conflicts. Their most recent paper examines the role of the World Bank in this process. As part of this research, he has met with staff members of the Bank and presented their research at the United States Institute of Peace.