Mason Auten

Mason Auten

PhD student in political science. I study statebuilding, war, and political economy of conflict using formal models and historical data.

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Pages

Posts

papers

The Foreign Politics of State-Making: Endogenous Power Shifts and the Logic of External Influence

Published:

Under what conditions do early states form? Existing theories argue that states develop through domestic contracts or external war. This paper shows how both mechanisms can instead produce weaker states. I conceptualize institutions as constraints on bargaining, which allows me to distinguish between temporary and durable concessions. Building on this, I develop a two-period, three-player formal model in which a foreign sponsor empowers either the ruler or the elite. Because the sponsor’s interference is strategic and predictable, it creates windows of opportunity for domestic actors. When elites are temporarily empowered, rulers often take steps after bargaining that erode institutions. Thus, agreements that appear beneficial to domestic audiences may prove temporary and weaken the state. Likewise, when domestic war is harmful to the state, a foreign sponsor may strategically empower one side precisely to trigger conflict. The model advances scholarship on state building in three ways. First, it provides new scope conditions for contract and bellicist theories. Second, it incorporates common patterns of third-party interference, such as the role of the church (Gryzmala-Busse 2024). Third, it offers a formal explanation for why Europe remained territorially fragmented until the early modern period.

Family Ties: How Kin Networks Shaped the Development of the European State

Published:

Europe’s political fragmentation paved the way for war to make the state. The Catholic Church contributed to that fragmentation, but how did the Church decide whom to target? I argue that elite kin networks functioned as informal institutions, enabling commitments and reducing information asymmetries among medieval nobility. The informality of these arrangements, however, left them vulnerable to outside interference. I theorize that the pope targeted nobles whose network centrality made them valuable enough to disrupt the domestic order but not so entrenched as to resist papal pressure. To test this theory, I construct a genealogical dataset of nobility alive during the Investiture Conflict (1076-1122), geolocate these nobles, and match them to the papal correspondence of Gregory VII. I find that the pope selectively targeted nobles at intermediate levels of network centrality, consistent with an inverted-U relationship between connectedness and papal targeting.

talks

teaching

Intro to Graduate Research

Introductory Graduate Course, Vanderbilt University, Political Science, 2025

Intro To Graduate Research With Patrick Buhr