Dr. Carl LeVan's Homepage

Development, Security, African Politics

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Assistant Professor
School of International Service, American University
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20016-8071
Telephone: (202) 885-2457
Email: levan@american.edu

Follow @Dev4Security

What will be the likely impact of the Nigerian government’s current counter-terrorism strategy towards Boko Haram?  An electronic version of my forthcoming essay, “Sectarian Rebellions in Post-Transition Nigeria Compared” is available from the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.  Download a free copy by clicking here, courtesy of Taylor & Francis.

Briefly, about me:
I teach courses on African politics and comparative political theory at American University, where I serve as Africa Coordinator for the Comparative and Regional Studies Program in the School of International Service. My research focuses on African political institutions, democratization, and political development.  I just finished a book that uses veto player theory to explain government performance in Nigeria since independence. Using original qualitative and quantitative data, my empirical tests challenge the conventional wisdom about the impact of regime type, foreign debt, ethnic diversity, and oil on policy outputs.  Click here to download excerpts from the introduction.

I am very active with the African Politics Conference Group, a professional association that organizes panels at the annual conferences of the African Studies Association, the American Political Science Association, and at other academic meetings.

The 2012 edition of Freedom House’s Countries at the Crossroads is now out! 

Click here to download the chapter on Nigeria that I co-authored with Patrick Ukata.

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• FEATURED RESEARCH: “Analytic Authoritarianism in Nigeria”

  In this article, forthcoming in Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, I situate Nigeria's dictatorships within a new area of research that I call "analytic authoritarianism." This literature questions personal rule and studies a range of dependent variables, such as why dictators sometimes provide public goods. These scholars emphasize the inherent collective nature of governance, and explore the institutional basis of policy control.

  Building on insights from this literature, I then demonstrate how different military factions and subnational actors in Nigeria imposed transaction costs on the policy process between 1966 and 1998. These alternative centres of policy control limited the ability of dictators to unilaterally advance their policy preferences on questions relating to federalism and transition plans, two issue areas of importance to each regime. I conclude by linking this analysis to Nigeria’s lingering legacies authoritarianism and the institutional basis of its 1999 transition.